Well, as I understood it, it was a matter of the pins not making good contact with the patch. Made sense that elevating the patch by means of making a few small "sodder hills" would eliminate distance as a possible culprit.
And, again, for a while it worked. It was solid in the beginning. For some reason, it became more and more unstable, though, and now it's disconnecting several times every flight and I need to twist the grip some to get the connection back.