Interesting. I believe brass is suppose to be one of the best conducting metals as well. Did you put an insulator, shield or jacket over it?
Yes, brass works quite well. I've used the thick, adhesive type heat shrink tubing to cover it. I've also left it bare.
I wonder if a tube would conduct as well as single or stranded wire or have more of a skin effect? Not sure how you would check that. You might notice though.
For RF, tubing works just fine. The skin effect is pronounced enough that being hollow has no adverse impact, and in fact probably works better because RF currents will flow on both the inside and outside surfaces of the tubing.
What setup did you use the ridgid coax for?.
Several things... I've built impedance matching lines, power dividers, and an unusual device called a line stretcher that uses telescoping sections to change the length of the transmission line. I've also built adapters where I need, say, an N male connector on one end and a female TNC on the other with 4 inches of coax in between. If it's in an amplifier running a few hundred watts, and RG58 isn't sufficient and RG8 is too difficult to work such a short length, making a custom adapter starts to make sense. Not coax, but I've also built microwave waveguide out of copper water pipe.
Yeah I worded that badly, meant to say how well will the transceiver receieve/transmit if you only used a center conducter hooked up to the transceiver and antenna. Juat a bare or insulated wire with a connector soldered to each end. Not to well I imagine.
No, I thought you worded it just fine, hence my answer. Without the outer shield, that center conductor will radiate just like an antenna, so the antenna would start right at the back of the radio. Very little energy would reach the actual antenna.
That could come in handy if you don't have or wanna use an antenna tuner.
Possibly, but usually coaxial matching sections are a fixed part of a more complex antenna system. Phased folded dipole collinear arrays might need some unusual impedance of coax to act as an impedance transformer, for example.
In that application, it's not a choice of that or an antenna tuner. The tuner just doesn't apply. Same thing with a power divider where a 50 ohm coax must attach to two 50 ohm antennas. Making a coaxial section of a specific impedance for a specific length will transform the impedance to pretty much whatever you need it to be.