@Julia Chavez yeah sub-500m in open field is a massive red flag and your instinct is right — that's not a normal real-world derating situation, that's almost certainly interference or antenna coupling killing your link budget. LiPo cells are relatively benign but switching regulators are brutal for RF — if you've got a buck converter running anywhere in the 2-10MHz switching frequency range, those harmonics can absolutely trash your receiver sensitivity, and the MultiNav Pro+ is doing a lot of work on the receiver side to hit those range figures, so any noise floor elevation hits you hard.
The other thing worth checking before you reroute anything — is the antenna keepout zone being respected on your carrier board? Even if the module itself is positioned okay, copper pours or ground planes bleeding under the antenna section will detune it significantly. Pull up the module footprint and make sure there's no copper, including ground fill, under that antenna trace or whip.
If you want a quick diagnostic before committing to a board spin: try the module standalone with no carrier board, just direct power from a clean linear supply or even a USB bank, and retest range. If you suddenly get numbers that are dramatically better, you've confirmed the carrier board is your problem and you can isolate whether it's the regulator noise or the antenna keepout violation causing it.
