This paper proposes a novel design of intermediate frequency(IF) digital receiver for wideband inverse synthetic aperture radar(ISAR) based on compressed sensing(CS). For the convenience in engineering application, we use random sampling in the digital receiver and make it possible to digitize the wideband IF signal using a commercial off-the-shelf analog-to-digital converter with sub-Nyquist sample rate. Besides, a novel basis for the sparse representation of real-valued ISAR radar echoes is built in this paper, and an orthogonal CS reconstructing algorithm is proposed based on this. Using our proposed method, the complex-valued range profile of target can be directly reconstructed from the subsampled real raw echo. The phase information of target range profile, which is very important for the coherent processing in ISAR imaging, is well reserved during the reconstruction. As a result, the down converter and matched filter, which are essential in conventional radar receiver, can be eliminated in our CS digital receiver. A series of simulation validates our design and demonstrates the feasibility of the sub-Nyquist sampling. The simulation results of ISAR imaging verify the validity and superiority of the proposed orthogonal reconstructing method. This paper proposes a novel design of intermediate frequency (IF) digital receiver for wideband inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) based on compressed sensing (CS). For the convenience in engineering application, we use random sampling in the digital receiver and make it possible to digitize the wideband IF signal using a commercial off-the-shelf analog-to-digital converter with sub-Nyquist sample rate. In addition, a novel basis for the sparse representation of real-valued ISAR radar echoes is built in this paper, and an orthogonal CS reconstructing algorithm is proposed based on this. Using the proposed method, the complex-valued range profile of target can be directly reconstructed from the subsampled real raw echo. The phase information of target range profile, which is very important for the coherent processing in ISAR imaging, is well reserved during the reconstruction. As a result, the down converter and matched filter, which are essential in conventional radar receiver, can be el A series of simulation validates our design and demonstrates the feasibility of the sub-Nyquist sampling. The simulation results of ISAR imaging verify the validity and superiority of the proposed orthogonal reconstructing method.