Abstract: Taking self-fields into consideration, dispersion properties of two types of electromagnetic modes for a high energy electron beam guided with an ion channel are investigated by using the linear perturbation theory. The dependences of the dispersion frequencies of electromagnetic waves on the electron beam radius, betatron frequency and boundary current are revealed. It is found that the electron beam radius and betatron frequency have different influences on the electromagnetic waves dispersion behavior by compared with the previous works. As the boundary current is taken into account, the TM modes will have two branches and a low-frequency branch emerged as the new branch in strong ion channel case. This new branch has similar dispersion behavior to the betatron modes. For TE modes, there are two branches and they have different dispersion behaviors in strong ion channel case. However, in weak ion channel case, the dispersion behaviors for both of the low frequency and high frequency branches are similar.