The research on basics of satellite navigation has been boosted in the last years, by the modernization of GPS and the development of the new Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), as for example the European Galileo. The research activities on receivers have to be supported by proper tools that allow the analysis of new algorithms, the investigation of the signal processing stages and the design of digital architectures, considering the new GNSS signal structures and modulations. This paper focuses on a software receiver, named Itaca, designed for scientific applications. After a short introduction, the paper describes the main features of the software platform and shows the major results obtained using Itaca in three different GNSS applications