Receiver
There are various design solutions you may prefer. I personally have built 3 systems and they are all different. What is common though is that all of them make use of low-noise transistors, active antennas and coaxial cavity filters.
What are coaxial cavity filters? You can look at the drawings and pictures here.
These filters are very useful in this design since they have low insertion loss (if properly tuned). They also can be built with narrower bandwidth compared to the readily available SAW filters.
One of my receivers is without any SAW filters. In this case though, I needed a dual coaxial filter to get a proper attenuation of GSM cell signals. Dual filters aren't easy to tune. But since I've done it, probably you'll be able, too.
A better approach is to use just one SAW filter to clear out everything below 1070MHz and above 1110 MHz. Due to the position of this filter in the circuit, it doesn't degrade the sensitivity at all! This design also needs two single coaxial filters. These aren't easy to build and tune, too. But it's not that hard, I promise!
A word about the amplifiers: It's possible to have the 35db gain you need using only two amplifier stages (one in the preamp and one in the receiver). Why I use three stages combined with attenuators? Because this way it was easy for me (being not very experienced RF designer) to achieve both stability and impedance matching.
If you can do the job using only two stages, be my guest!
The output of the detector is a good indicator of whether the amplifiers are stable. There should be a noise like this one.
If you start soldering from the detector and back, you may take a note about the quiescent voltage at the output and it should slightly increase when you solder the amplifier stages (say,from 0.45V it may rise to 0.55V; it depends on the gain and noise figure). If the level jumps up drastically, there must be instability somewhere. This will ruin the performance and should not happen!
The antenna preamplifier is powered by the receiver via the coaxial.