At the end of my wits here, I've upgraded to the latest Dist of Kali and since doing so my adapter will only see my router! Rolled back to kali 2016 and works perfectly and I can see 15 SSIDs and when connected to my yagi I can see 35! Updated again to 2017 and it dropped to my router only (same when connected to the yagi).

I've ran it through wavemon:
2016 link quality = 100%
2017 link quality = 49%

There has been no hardware changes, I preformed and apt-get update && apt-get upgrade before each test.

Downloaded the firmware from Alfa and cp'd the vanilla firmware into the firmware folder and it's made no difference.

I've ran a comparison in 2017 with my WM722N adapter, signal strength is 100% and it can see 13 SSID's however I don't want to be stuck using the 722N as it's purely for my pwnphone.

any help would be gratefully received as at this rate i'll be rolling back for good to 2016.

Thanks in advance.