2. Have a local ham or TV repair shop check the units out:

Or simply sell them as-is and let the buyer do the restoration. Most
shoppers at the typical estate sale are not hams or "radio people" and may
not even recognize what these things are. Unless you find a way to publicize
your sale to some kind of radio community, you might not find anyone
interested in buying, period. Whether the radio works or not would be
immaterial to a shopper looking for glassware or collectible toys. And a
serious radio buyer would understand that every radio of that vintage needs
some routine service before being played regularly.

For what it's worth, I sold a very nice Hammarlund HQ-170C a couple of years
ago for around $200. Again, it's a pretty narrow-interest receiver. Ham
bands only -- no shortwave, no standard broadcast band, so it wouldn't
interest the general public unless you find a dealer who plans to resell it
on eBay.

Consult a tax adviser to find out if the estate would
benefit more by donating some or all of the equipment
to a local ham club or school radio club.

Or radio collector club. Check the list at
http://www.antiqueradio.com/clublist.html to see if there's a club anywhere
in your vicinity.

To get a tax benefit from donation, you need to be able to verify the fair
market price of each item, and also make sure that the organization
qualifies for tax-deductible donations (the organization should be able to
tell you).

You could also ask the club to notify their members that the sale is coming
up.

Regarding the tubes, if you can connect with a nearby club, maybe someone
there could stop by and eyeball the collection, to give you some rough clue
what they're worth. A lot of the tubes used in 1950s/1960s receivers are
still very common and not worth a heck of a lot, even if new. And as noted
earlier, radio servicemen were notorious for sticking dead or half-dead
tubes into the boxes after installing a new tube. So unless you have a
sealed box that obviously was never opened, you have to either assume the
tube is used, or go through the process of testing it.

There are earlier tube types, such as 45 or 1L6, that are worth more, but of
course they are scarcer. Most TV tubes are still available new in vast
quantities and worth almost nothing. But there are a few exceptions. If you
have a type 15GP22 color TV picture tube, I'd be interested in that, for
example, but they were scarce when new and few if any exist at this time,
outside of the original TVs that they came in.

Some suppliers, such as Antique Electronic Supply,
http://www.tubesandmore.com/ , do buy old stocks of tubes for resale. You
could get some idea of what yours are worth by looking at their website. Of
course, they would offer you a wholesale price rather than the retail price
shown on their site.

Regards,

Phil Nelson