"I have discovered spurs in the output of my transmitter.  They are 60 db down, but I still can't stop thinking about them.  What should I do?"

I can't help thinking that if Jean Shepherd had access to something like this, his Heising modulator trouble might not have spoiled his date with the girl from his school.  

What do you guys think about the Woebot?  

http://soldersmoke.com/JeanShepherd1976WMCA.mp3

One side note.  I told my wife that some time after the broadcast, I was once again up early in the morning, kind of absent-mindedly getting ready for work when I heard Shepherd talking on WMCA to some guy about ham radio.  It took me a moment to realize that this was a re-run, and that that guy was me!  

When I first listened to this I didn't realize that later in the recording (around 9:30) another fellow calls in an asks Shep about why he uses CW.  Shep is kind of short with him and ends up advising him to "go back to CB." I should note that in my conversation with Shep earlier in the program,  I told him that I was usually on "40 sideband."  He was nice to me, but said that he was mostly on 20 CW. 

I posted about this back in 2008, but I was listening to it again today, and quickly realized that it is worth re-posting.   Realize that Shepherd's Heising modulation problems happened almost 90 years ago.  But the same kind of obsession affect the homebrewers of today.  

Note too how Shepherd talks about "Heising" in Heising modulation.  Heising has an entire circuit named for him, just like Hartley, Colpitts, and Pierce of oscillator fame.  Sometimes, when I tell another ham that my rig is homebrew, I get a kind of snide, snarky, loaded question:  "Well, did you DESIGN it yourself?"  This seems to be a way for appliance operators to deal with the fact that while they never build anything, someone else out there does melt solder.  They seem to think that the fact that you did not design the rig yourself makes your accomplishment less impressive, less threatening.  This week I responded to this question with Shepherd's observation -- I told the enquiring ham that my rig is in fact homebrewed, but that I had not invented the Colpitts oscillator, nor the common emitter amplifier, not the diode ring mixer, nor the low-pass filter.  But yes, the rig is homebrew, as was Shepherd's Heising modulator.    

Guys, stop what you are doing. Put down that soldering iron, or that cold Miller High Life ("the champagne of bottled beer") and click on the link below. You will be transported back to 1965 (and 1934!), and will hear master story-teller Jean Shepherd (K2ORS) describing his teenage case of The Knack. He discusses his efforts to build a Heising modulated transmitter for 160 meters. He had trouble getting it working, and became obsessed with the problem, obsessed to the point that a girl he was dating concluded that there was "something wrong with him" and that his mother "should take him to a doctor."