Meshtastic

Sorry, it's my dumb ass again, I've been spamming a lot as I learn.

So, I just got a rooftop node set up at my gf's place.
It is a RAK 3312 ESP32-S3 module (labelled 3112 for some reason), on a 19007 WisBlock base board, coupled with the RAK1906 environment sensor and RAK12002 RTC.
It's connected to a RAK 5.8dbi outdoor antenna via a male-N to MHF-4 connector I special ordered from a different site.
I'm powering it via some 18ga cable down the chimney connected to a RAK 5v power supply, and it has a 2000mah battery alongside it to provide backup power.
Everyone uses longfast here.

Some pics:

spoiler

Now, I am having significantly worse TX/RX performance than I had expected out of a nice aerial. My handheld node, which is a TLORA T3-S3 using some crappy ass 6" long china 915mhz antenna from Aliexpress, was able see a reliable hillside repeater from her driveway. Not with great signal strength since it's around a ridge, but it CAN see it, pretty reliably once in a while.
This node I built, can't see anything. After leaving it on it saw maybe one other node for a little while on bootup, then it disappeared. The reliable hill side node is invisible.
Transmitting on LongFast (our area's default) shows maybe 50-60% of what I send gets out, but basically nothing is ever received. I can sometimes see it's enviro telemetry from my home node through 1 hop, but I can't ever talk back to it. Whereas my handheld node can often hear the reliable hill side node and still talk to my home base.

I tried reflashing it with both stable and alpha firmwares, and while the alpha firmware did increase it's stability and fix some other issues with retransmitting and wifi, I noticed while doing that I get a lot of these red messages in the console complaining about an Error -7 when rx'ing:

Before you jump down my throat, yes I know about high gain antennas having a narrow vertical beam width. 35deg on the RAK (17.5 up/down) should be way more than enough to overcome the ~40m height change between this and any other major node at the distances I am dealing with.

Anyway, I'm at a loss with this stupid hardware, and I don't have any other antennas to really test it with because of the worst connector ever known to man (mhf-4). There's definitely a need for additional nodes between this location and the rest of the mesh, but I expected to achieve some connection considering my handheld seems to be able to.

am open to any ideas for how to diagnose this node's performance. Is it a bad radio, bad antenna, bad connector I bought? Do I just RMA the radio and see if a new one does any better?