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I'm still playing with the rocket antenna.
The rocket body is a 12 inch diameter aluminum tube.



How high is the rocket going ? If you are running 1 watt of power, then
the rocket will be in view of the ground station ? then just about anything
you do will be good enough for a transmitting antenna. Try insulating
(electrically) the transmitter from the body of the rocket and feeding the
output of the transmitter directly to the body of the rocket.
Seems that you are over engineering a simple system.