Recently, much effort has been placed toward the development of the Reconfigurable Wideband Ground Receiver (RWGR): a variable-rate, reprogrammable software-defined radio intended to supplement and augment the capabilities of the Block V Receiver. In this report, we first give an overview of the hardware architecture of the RWGR, including a detailed description of the filter-decimate front-end and subsequent high-rate receiver system, which includes a 4 sample/symbol demodulator core. We then present a series of laboratory hardware performance results, including bit error rate (BER) results at various data rates. The RWGR is shown to yield performance close to theory in terms of BER with losses typically less than 1 dB in bit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).