I recall seeing somebody that took some stick-on copper foil, trimmed it to the tuned length of the frequency (for 900 MHz about 80mm) and stuck it on the outside of the rocket, essentially making a dipole antenna out of the outside of the AV bay. You'd need two 80mm-long pieces, of course... one for the antenna and one for the ground plane. I haven't personally tried it, but it looks intriguing. This will work fine for the telemetry, but GPS reception is a different story... you're going to need an external patch antenna. Look them up on Mouser or DigiKey, there's quite a few of them around with u.fl cables attached. Good luck with your build, it sounds like fun!
The other alternative is a colored "glass" nosecone ("any thing other than black") and stuff the tracker in there. I agree with Mr. Krech. Why make this more complex than it needs to be? How does the wiring become complicated with a NC tracker? Turn the tracker on, button up the nosecone and go fly.
Can try some unconventional stuff like like using an FG ebay coupler tube and have the GPS tracker/antenna ride in the aft portion. Would have the tracker get a lock onsite, set it on the CF rocket quickly and launch hoping the tracker would get a lock when ejected at apogee for the ride down. Would also need an aft bulkhead antenna so it would be exposed at apogee so the Rf can get out "there". Might be prudent to slap an RDF tracker to boot on the harness for backup sake. One really shouldn't expect very many telemetered position packets on the "up" side anyways as the high "G's" and doppler effects at the GPS receiver affect the decoding along with the imposed
speed limitations. It's near apogee and the ride down one wants to see the positions streaming in.
Also if insisting on totally CF, would be easy enough to embed some copper tape on the exposed surface of the tube to make an external dipole like others have mentioned. If going only 5 miles up, me thinks surface heating of the airframe would not be enough to worry about delamination of the copper foil. I'd use a simple clear laminating epoxy without any additives though. The only other hangup is "getting" the the GPS satellite signals to the receiver and
that would entail an external "radome", patch GPS antenna or hole in the wall of the carrier with some sort of window. If you ask me, gets a bit complicated.
I just don't know why this fascination of real time data acquisition. The only thing that's needed is to have adequate position information to recover the rocket. Once found, the onboard electronics can be accessed and the data off loaded.
Real time is only necessary if one doesn't expect to see the project again, but that of course might take more work and cost to achieve.
It only takes one or two GPS position packets to find a rocket although it's cool to be able to see a graphical presentation of a flight in real time on a map. For now, that's a PITA to do and the only thing out there that's easy enough and doesn't cost an arm and a leg is the Altus Metrum software/hardware. There are a couple of ham radio apps that can be hacked for NMEA trackers but it's a lot of work to achieve. GPS Rocket Locator for NMEA trackers is getting close to off line map caching.
Yeah, yeah. I know about "Kate" but she's a high dollar flight escort. Those that have "used" her some are plenty happy about the affair. If flying a very high cost project, the cost of Kate (Multitronix
https://www.multitronix.com/) is probably not much compared to the value of the other flight components. For those with a more limited budget there are some pretty good choices out there.
I expect the flying community is getting close to off line real time tracking that's economical to do soon in the future. Kurt