In this paper, for a software-based Global Positioning System receiver (SGR), the principle capturing Global Positioning System (GPS) signal is researched extensively in order to analyze the processing of the GPS raw data signal at the lowest level, and the process of capturing the GPS signal was simulated by Matlab. The simulation results show the accuracy and the feasibility of this method, which is comparable to study under a true environment. We know that the improvement of the receiving facilities is of very vital significance to the performance of this system, and the fine frequency can be found through comparing phases within a few tens of Hertz.