Bought laptop with a busted USB-C port for cheap with the hope to repair it.

Well there's your problem, no wonder it wouldn't charge.

Picture taken with Sony A7 III and AstrHori f/2.8 2-5x Ultra Macro (somewhere mid-magnification range and f/11), lit with a single hot-shoe-mounted Godox TT350s flash in auto mode.

Today I learned that the VERA TDOA "radar" doesn't actually do correlation on the IQ data centrally, but rather each of the rx stations does all the signal processing locally and only passes along info about every identified signal bursts with timestamps and description, and the multilateration only happens from the timestamped descriptors.

It makes sense that you would rather do this than push 1GHZ BW worth of IQ data over microwave links, but still wouldn't expect it to work that good.