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This novel made a tremendous impact on me as a kid in the late '50s or early '60s, and I would like to read it again. I’ve looked through lists of hundreds of titles from the era without finding it. What I remember: A galactic empire exists. Travel between already developed worlds is so fast, using sender and receiver transporters, that that the gases around the transported do not escape.

A transport technician discovers the scam where the only destination for exiles is a metal-poor prison world (Eden?) no matter what world they choose. He modifies a spaceship so that it is both sender and receiver (with an old fashioned loop antenna on front, which may have been on the cover), and can travel anywhere he likes. He fights the galactic government, and at one point his ship accidentally self-transports for hours, taking him to a weird and distant galaxy.

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    The farcical Bob Shaw novel "Who Goes Here?" has spaceships with a teleporter transmitter on the back and a receiver on the front. That's the only place I've ever seen that, but the rest does not seem to match.
    – Organic Marble
    Jan 30, 2021 at 14:16

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Sounds like "The Last Space Ship" by Murray Leinster, published in 1949.

In the remote future, galaxy has been colonized by humans: time ago, spaceships have been scrapped because they've been supplanted by instant teleport as the common means of travel.
The problem is, teleport stations are controlled by the government.

People who have been sentenced for any reason are sent to a prison world: the protagonist refuses this exile and, after having been passively aggressively forced to accept the sentence for a week or so (by having his rights progressively reduced), hijacks his grandfather's spaceship - now exhibited in a museum - to run away.
He did some kind of adjustments to the ship's equipment before taking off.

Then the rest of the plot happens.

The novel ends with the protagonist jumping to another galaxy.

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    I found the full text and this was definitely "The Last Space Ship," though I had no memory of the title. I'd also remembered the Disciplinary Circuits that the protagonist was fighting, but was afraid I'd confused that with another book. In fact, turns out the novel was indeed a fix-up of three novellas.
    – Lou
    Jan 30, 2021 at 15:44

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