This article presents a tutorial on design principles for a backscatter receiver with a general architecture of three stages: structural mode removal, equalization and antenna compensation. The method requires three known loads and the observation of the three associated field values, which can be obtained using three pilot symbols at the beginning of each transmission. Receiver performance is estimated over a corrupt backscatter channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The proposed architecture can be easily implemented in a software-defined radio (SDR).