Today's advanced reflectometry methods provide an efficient solution for the diagnosis of electric transmission line hard faults (open and short circuits), but they are much less efficient for soft faults, in particular, for faults resulting in spatially smooth variations of characteristic impedance. This paper attempts to fill an important gap for the application of the inverse scattering transform to reflectometry-based soft fault diagnosis: it clarifies the relationship between the reflection coefficient measured with reflectometry instruments and the mathematical object of the same name defined in the inverse scattering theory, by reconciling finite length transmission lines with the inverse scattering transform defined on the infinite interval. The feasibility of this approach is then demonstrated by numerical simulation of lossless transmission lines affected by soft faults, and by the solution of the inverse scattering problem effectively retrieving smoothly varying characteristic impedance profiles from reflection coefficients.