Improving GPS positioning accuracy requires an understanding of the inner workings of GPS receivers. However, the necessary hardware and software for research is prohibitively expensive. It is almost impossible to modify the correlator and functions of signal acquisition and tracking in commercial GPS hardware. The software GPS receiver allows us to access the inner workings of the receiver without significant time or expense. The present paper introduces a prototype software GPS receiver developed by us, which consists of a commercial RF-module and PC-based signal processing software. In addition, the software GPS receiver is shown herein to enable evaluation and mitigation of the code multipath error with the outputs of a software multi-correlator, which can be implemented easily in a software GPS receiver, with the aid of maximum likelihood criteria.