In recent years, a large demand for additional and high-quality services in the telecommunications industry has led to rapid development of digital receiver technology. This demand has produced many cost effective, high performance technologies. Advances in this technology are finding many uses in a variety of fields within the scientific community. Digital receivers, combined with today's high speed personal computers, are changing the field of data acquisition. Modern acquisition systems benefit from digital receiver technology in many ways. Digital receivers provide light weight, portable solutions that are software reconfigurable. Digital receiver systems are low cost, low maintenance, and, in many respects, are capable of outperforming their analog counterparts. The Arecibo Observatory is developing and has tested this technology during both meteor and ionospheric observations. We will describe the concepts and architecture of the digital receiver. We will also discuss the principles of the software used to develop the system.