And now for the main reason I put this post on Hackaday.io: it doesn't work.

Well, at least, I don't think it works. After rigging all this up and plugging it in, I'm not seeing any appreciable increase in distance. In fact, I think I may have made things worse. I seem to get the same distance whether I've plugged the antenna in or not.

It's not a bad connection. Multimeter in connectivity mode gives the good beeps, 0ohms resistance, from inside the router board all the way to the tip of the antenna. Well, it could be connection issues, as in something intermittent or not shown by my simple test, but I'm not sure.

It's not the radome either (I think). Just using the bare wire doesn't make it go any further.

So... how in the world do I fix this? I don't even know what I'm testing for. Keep in mind my tools are limited (multimeter, tablet with WiFi Analyzer installed). Bad impedance match in the connectors, feedline, etc? How would I check that? Wire lengths wrong? How close do they have to be, really? I'm just thoroughly stumped here.