This is very similar to my problem, tried everything. PineAP will only gather from about five feet away. Recon / Site Survey works no issue. However, connecting to management AP, I get nothing or bad password and I know it is right - changed and did all sorts of troubleshooting. I did a test creating a network from the other side of the house. Watched and refreshed PineAP result every few minutes. Walked it in ten feet and checked, did this until five feet away and it finally showed up in the list. Repeated this several times with same result. Factory reset several times as well.