Unable to reactivate baker, ithacanet

Question

Baker tz1fh2hMTTQKYejt4F4wCxyQAD1VenCpMEg3 on ithacanet became inactive yesterday, after it had failed to endorse since the beginning of rights. Endorsement problem may've been due to the remote signing not being set up correctly. I think I have the remote signing with tezos-signer working as expected now, but I'm unable to reactivate the baker. I run

tezos-client register key omaha as delegate

and get this error

Error: Empty implicit contract (tz1.......

I turned on debug for the tezos node, but nothing additional showed up.

edit: I noticed that the block at which the baker was registered is not in the current chain which I had imported from a rolling snapshot (I had moved to a new vps yesterday). Going to import a full or archive snapshot and see what happens.

edit 2: downloading the archive didn't work. Still the "empty implicit contract" error

edit 3: account doesn't appear to be empty $ tezos-client get balance for omaha Warning:

             This is NOT the Tezos Mainnet.

       Do NOT use your fundraiser keys on this network.

15134.601365

edit 4: An hour later, reran the command and account now reactivated. Instead of getting the error, saw:

$ tezos-client register key omaha as delegate
Warning:

                 This is NOT the Tezos Mainnet.

           Do NOT use your fundraiser keys on this network.

Node is bootstrapped.
Estimated gas: 1000 units (will add 100 for safety)
Estimated storage: no bytes added
Operation successfully injected in the node.
Operation hash is 'opRa91YXAmpAQoaiyjHXv4d4xPuqFThrSmaWfb22mPm9Watt2kk'
Waiting for the operation to be included...
Operation found in block: BLaAK1Uvp1msGWkLryS4zDATSyF2FMY3yoX8L9F48MtyFNo1cGp (pass: 3, offset: 0)
This sequence of operations was run:
  Manager signed operations:
    From: tz1fh2hMTTQKYejt4F4wCxyQAD1VenCpMEg3
    Fee to the baker: ꜩ0.000359
    Expected counter: 4771990
    Gas limit: 1100
    Storage limit: 0 bytes
    Balance updates:
      tz1fh2hMTTQKYejt4F4wCxyQAD1VenCpMEg3 ... -ꜩ0.000359
      payload fees(the block proposer) ....... +ꜩ0.000359
    Delegation:
      Contract: tz1fh2hMTTQKYejt4F4wCxyQAD1VenCpMEg3
      To: tz1fh2hMTTQKYejt4F4wCxyQAD1VenCpMEg3
      This delegation was successfully applied
      Consumed gas: 1000

The operation has only been included 0 blocks ago.

The only thing I may've done differently was running this command

tezos-client activate account omaha with testtez-ithaca.json --force

Got an error from that command so don't know if it still managed to "trip" something