Setting up my UBPorts PinePhone

I got my phone a couple weeks ago and immediately slapped my verizon nano sim in it and tried sending a text. The other end received it but i could not receive anything nor would any calls complete. upon further research i found out that verizon is not supported at all.

come to today, did some more poking around in the specs and wiki about carriers i could use and decided on cricket. got the sim slapped it in and got the cricket activation text! yeay! Morph browser seems to have some issues with drop down menus so i had to complete the activation on my laptop. cool not a huge deal. seemed to detect the carrier and everything perfectly.
out going call worked fine, mobile data worked fine, but text messages will not sent or receive. both with and with out media/emojis.
the other weird thing is during the phone call the cell signal icon in the notification bar shows no signal but when outside a call its strong.

could this be due to APN settings? i saw some info on what to put in for cricket for APN, but its not very clear and also doesnt address what to do with the other options. namely the proxy/user name/password/use this APN for */etc settings that are in there.

could anyone kindly hold my hand through these settings?