The present invention provides a high-performance adaptive digital receiver with adaptive background control that optimizes the performance in rapidly changing signal environments and provides 3.6 GH; instantaneous bandwidth, SFDR>90 dB, SNR=66 dB, with dynamic digital channelization. The receiver takes advantage of several levels of adaptivity that conventional approaches do not offer. In addition to a dynamic digital channelizer that is adaptively tuned based on detected signals, the present invention employs a powerful software reconfigurable digitizer that is adaptively optimized for the current signal environment to control important receiver parameters such as bandwidth, dynamic range, resolution, and sensitivity.