You are not gaining anything as you are transmitting on only one antenna and only receiving on one antenna. Therefore the total increase in gain is zero. All you have is the gain of the antenna, minus the loss in cables etc of course. I.e. you gain nothing from this setup. Except some redundancy if one antenna fails, you can then switch to the one remaining one that is still working.
You are not working in full duplex as the same card is plugging into both antennae. There is still only the one card. You are still working in Simplex mode, except the RF goes out of one connector and returns back down the other.
Where is this combiner you suggest using? The two ports on the Mini-PCI card are connected via a Tx/Rx switching transistor, not a combiner. Or do you mean an external box?
If you use an external power combiner/splitter, then that device will have losses too (how much loss depends on what device you use and how well it's constructed) and every doubling of the antennae (of equal gain figures) only increases the gain by 3dB (minus losses of roughly 0.5 -> 1dB within the combiner, plus losses for the extra connectors, factor in between 0.1 and 0.5dB per connector).
If you have 4 antennae, pointing in all the same direction and they are all combined (only using one connector on the mini-pci card), then yes, you can get some benefit (some gain). But good quality, low loss combiners are not cheap and what is the point in pushing 1W into 4 antennae at 17dbi + 6dB gain - 1dB loss = 22dBi when the other end, the client only has a much lower power and a lower gain antenna to reply with?
Feeding multiple antenna, all pointing in the same direction is a useful technique for increasing the total system gain and has been used since at least the 1940's perhaps longer but at much lower frequencies! So nothing new there.
Also, by feeding the antennae together, in the same direction, it is very important to get the phasing right. This is incredibly difficuly at microwave frequencies. It is not just a matter of cutting all the cables the right length. Each cable will be required to be specially cut to length so that at the frequency being used, the phase of the RF arrives at the same time at each antenna.
Finally, by combining all those antennae together and obtaining your increased 22dBi gain, you will get a much tighter beamwidth. As they say, "you cannot get something for nothing". What you have "created" is a colinear antenna.
So, considering you started with 17dBi antennae and ended up with an expensive and complicated setup to get yourself an extra few dB, I would instead concentrate all the effort and time ensuring the client was getting a better connection back into the AP. Clients are often in poor locations, obstructed, badly aligned and having to use lower gain antenna and lower RF output powers as the customer does not like great big dishes on their roof.