I flew an FCC regulated TeleGPS on two flights L-1 multistage for college project this year as mechE student and rocket noob. You need to get familiar with the trackers, dude. You need to ground test a fully assembled rocket in and out. Have some friends walk off with it in many directions and practice finding it in and around trees/near buildings etc. Put it in a car if telemetry and track the route of vehicle for testing it. This will test materials for RF transparency at various ranges and angles first. You have only ten to twenty seconds of an actual flight tracking. You can't afford a screw up in flight or a lapse of how does this device function from program menu selection blah again? We found our rocket again. Another college had to use a light airplane and they failed to find a project one year, so its always cheaper and easier to learn the limits of your gear first.
Radio trackers work great for civil aircraft, ex-student pilot here... Less affected by terrain than GPS. More sensitive in signal directions as closing distance to station decreases. Okay with terrain changes, but not if station was in a mountain valley, you could lose a signal until nearly over top.
In model rockets. Radios not lose locks like GPS will under boost from high impulse motor at dozen to hundreds G loads.
GPS telemetry FCC regulated for rocket... We had discovered TeleGPS had a max tracking limit of 60.6Gs. You may discover it could do more, idk. It was rated for 8 Gs. It lost a 167G project in a desert once. It still had a lock over slight 500ft hill and into a tree line at 60G project. My humble opinion was GPS with RDF tracker dual mode took a steep learning curve to a new HAM operator. If you can select lower baud rates (FCC/Ham) high power devices, the range increases and sensitive improves as data transfer frequency, rates faster on tele. It was quite awesome as long as it was kept in limits. A radio has less limits, but like you I know very little about tracking a rocketry pure RF transmitter. We couldn't use dual RDF only mode on a UV-5R only heard the beep and no tone increased as got closer or left or right. It might need a different ham hand held radio to radio track.
Sorry for long winded rant. Felt overwhelmed too. Practice with it for a week and you'll feel better too.
In a plane the VOR radio would get more sensitive as it neared a ground station, leading to human error in missing the station, without much practice. You could overcorrect a heading to a station and miss it. I hope a rocket radio beacon doesn't behave as horridly, but expect a physical limitation of it.
Kurt
