The GEO_... stuff should be irrelevant for connecting. Nevertheless please set at least GEO_COORD_ELEV to the correct value of your location, since this value is used to calculate sea level air pressure.

Are you 100% sure that the serial device is the same as EKOS sets? Sometimes EKOS uses autodetect and changes the value.

The rest of the configuration looks reasonable...

Version 1.7 is OK, the only changes in 1.8 is that it supports multiple instances of Weather Radio. And the Arduino version does not matter.

For further analysis, try the python debugger pdb:

pdb wr_rrd_update.py