Spectral purity of the transmitter source of a collective Thomson scattering (CTS) system is vitally important to insure that measured signals only originate from the plasma and not from stray source light. A number of high power (up to 500 kW), 140 GHz gyrotron tubes used with the Joint European Torus (JET) CTS system have been found to have one or more spurious modes and many harmonics in the output spectrum. The CTS diagnostic receiver system was used to make measurements of the gyrotron spectrum. It was comprised of a homodyne part from MIT for frequency sidebands < 500 MHz, and a heterodyne part constructed at JET for frequency sidebands from 0.1 to 6 GHz. One tube at high power produced a strong 25 MHz mode and its harmonics to large frequency offsets, unsuitable for CTS measurements. Only at reduced power of approximately 100 kW was this tube's spectrum sufficiently clean for CTS. Another tube at JET operated at 500 kW output power with only low level parasitic modes, indicating that higher power gyrotrons may be available for future alpha particle measurements. The main receiver was tested with a low power test setup which simulated the gyrotron stray source light, the thermal ion feature and plasma electron cyclotron emission. ©1999 American Institute of Physics.