jessie

Hello, after setting up my Helios64 kit, flashing an SD card, and setting up the serial, i connect to picocom and nobody's home. there are no HDD installed yet because I am testing the board itself, but it will not boot. I have tried multiple known-good sandisk microsds, both the armbian and ubuntu version (whatever was current as of 1 Nov) with no success. would maskrom mode be my first logical step to recovery?