The paper is devoted to detection and determination of time of arrival of nonstationary components of wide-band signals with the use of time-frequency distributions, whose kernels are built based on transforms with the smoothing functions of the affine group. Characteristics of transforms belonging to this group, and their ability to detect nonstationary components in signals are considered. Some methods are presented for selecting the transforms of this group suitable for detection of certain components of wide-band signals. The methods are illustrated by an example of practical application of parametrized and pure kernels