First: we're sorry for your loss.
Second, and just as important: nothing has to happen fast. Ham equipment holds its value for years. It will hold for a few months while you grieve, settle the estate, and think. Anyone who pressures you to sell quickly — this week, today, right now — is telling you something about themselves, not about the equipment.
You do not need to know anything about radios to handle this well. You need three things: a list of what's there, honest numbers for what each piece is worth, and one trustworthy person to stand between you and the buyers. This page walks through all three.
Many operators fill out a station inventory: every piece of gear, its serial number, what it's honestly worth, and what he'd like done with it. Look for it with the will and important papers. If you find one, you already have the map — the rest of this page is how to use it.
If there's no inventory, that's normal too. You'll build a simple one in Step 2 — and the form at the bottom of this page is the template.
Write down each item's make and model (it's printed on the front or back panel) and its serial number. Photograph each piece. Don't plug anything in yet, and don't worry about whether it works — that's Step 3.
Then check each model in our free Price Checker: it shows what that model has actually sold for, from recorded real-world sales — not asking prices, not what someone paid for it new in 1998. No login, no callsign, no account — if you can type a model number, you can use it. That matters more than it might sound: much of this hobby's world is built for licensed operators only, and a family member without a callsign is locked out of it. Nothing on this page works that way. Write the figure next to each item and add them up. That total is your yardstick. Every offer you ever get gets measured against it.
Here is the part most guides get wrong: you cannot be expected to know whether this equipment works, and honest guidance shouldn't ask you to.
So the safe default is simple:
How honest testing sounds. In this hobby, most sellers never test everything, and the honest ones say exactly what they did: "Powered up, seems to be working, checked it on 20 meters." Teach yourself to write ads that way and to read them that way. A seller who names the one band he checked is probably telling the truth about the rest. Be wary of the ad — or the buyer — who claims everything with nothing behind it.
The single best protection is one knowledgeable person standing between your family and the buyers — answering questions, checking offers against your yardstick, and being present when gear changes hands.
Often that person finds you: a close friend of the operator's, someone who knew the family, who takes this on out of obligation to his buddy — not as a business. If a ham left an inventory form, he may have named that person on it. If not, the local amateur radio club is the next call — some clubs run standing committees for exactly this, pricing from sold listings and taking no percentage. What good help looks like: patient, happy to explain, never in a hurry, and never the person making you an offer themselves.
His knowledge is worth money, too. A buddy who visited that shack for years knows things no form and no hired service can: which rig was the go-to, what was on the air every night, and what little issues each piece had — because hams talk through their rig problems with each other constantly. That firsthand knowledge is the closest thing these radios have to a service history. When he tells a buyer "this was his main rig, it was on the air the week before he passed, and here's the one quirk it has," buyers believe him — and that belief closes much of the "untested" discount from Step 3. It's one more reason a stranger with a truck and a lowball offer is not a substitute.
The tower rule: don't let the radios and easy gear all leave before there's a firm plan — ideally in writing — for taking down the tower and antennas. Removal takes a licensed, insured crew and can cost real money, and a leftover tower can complicate selling the house. Tower first, or tower promised in writing, before the shack empties.
Some things will have no market — old magazines, homebuilt projects, parts. Donating them to his club or a charity is a respectable end for them, not a failure.
Fill out the Station Inventory form (free, printable, linked below) and put it with your will. It takes an evening. Do it for your family — and do it for your friend: the buddy who will stand in your widow's kitchen selling your radios deserves your values and your wishes in your own hand, so no one can ever wonder whether he helped himself. Don't leave him holding that bag with no cover.