The museum's chronological tour begins with mechanical music reproduction in the pre-electrical era - phonographs, music boxes, and the cylinders and discs that played on them. Visitors then move into the wireless era, with a working crystal radio receiver and a rotary spark gap demonstrator that shows how the earliest radio transmitters generated the electromagnetic waves that carried sound across distances. This is the technology of Marconi, Tesla, and the amateur experimenters who built radio out of basement workshops in the years before the broadcast industry existed. The hands-on nature of the exhibits is intentional. The Museum of Radio and Technology is not a place where you stand behind a velvet rope. You can twist the dial on the crystal radio, listen to the broadcast, and feel the technology working.

The 1940s and 1950s showroom recreates a typical radio and television store from the postwar consumer boom. Tube and transistor radios, television sets, wire and tape recorders, vintage turntables, and tuners line the walls. The Gilbert Company display includes Erector sets, chemistry sets, microscopes, and the famous Atomic Energy Lab. A. C. Gilbert was the dominant American maker of educational toys from the 1910s through the 1960s, and his company's products defined what middle-class American children were expected to learn at home about science and engineering. The showroom captures the moment when those toys were sold across the counter from the consumer electronics that defined adult American leisure - radio and television as the daily entertainment infrastructure of every household.

The ham radio displays form one of the museum's strongest sections. Short-wave receivers and transmitters used by amateur operators across decades are organized around what museum staff call the Big H's - Hallicrafters, Hammarlund, Heath, and National (the latter included because, as the museum notes, the N looks like an H). Modern amateur equipment fills another room, including the museum's own active amateur radio station with call sign WV8MRT, which licensed visitors are welcome to operate. Military communication equipment from World War II and after fills another display - field radios, encryption devices, and the heavy duty gear that armies depended on for command and control across continents.

The broadcasting room holds equipment from the heart of the twentieth-century broadcast industry. The centerpiece is a massive 5,000-watt AM transmitter from the 1930s - the kind of cabinet-sized apparatus that filled the technical rooms of major broadcast stations and made network radio possible. Recorders, cameras, control boards, and the famous NBC chimes are also on display. The radio DJ studio recreates a working broadcast studio of the kind that disc jockeys used from the early 1950s to the late 1990s - the platter-spinning era of American radio. Visitors can sit at the console and see how it feels. The auditorium and stage host three auction sales and swap meets per year, the annual West Virginia Broadcasting Hall of Fame ceremony, and occasional Radio Dinner Theater performances.

The museum building was Harveytown Elementary School from the 1920s through the 1970s. One section of the museum is dedicated to the children who sat in its classrooms across that fifty-year span - the local Harveytown history that the building itself carries. A computer display traces the timeline of desktop computers from the IMSAI 8080 of the mid-1970s through the original Apple Mac and Lisa - including a seven-megabyte hard drive the size of a suitcase. The library holds books, magazines, and a near-complete collection of H. W. Sams and Ryder service manuals - the technical literature that radio and electronics repair people depended on for decades. Admission to all of it is free. The Museum of Radio and Technology runs on volunteer effort and member support, doing serious institutional work without serious institutional resources.