Honestly I used to think the whole 5G conspiracy thing was overblown, my buddy works in telecom and he'd say coverage gaps were just terrain or budget stuff. But then I pulled the same FCC data for my area last month, just out of curiosity, and saw 11 towers with permit filings that literally said "antenna replacement" with zero public notice dates. The kicker was that two of those towers showed as fully operational on the official map the whole time, but my phone dropped to 3G within a hundred feet of them. That mismatch between the paper trail and reality is what got me, it's not even about health fears for me anymore, it's just the lying that bugs me.

Yeah, but did you try a left hand drill bit before you went full hammer mode? Brass grabs those things like crazy sometimes, way easier than fighting a dowel. I keep a cheap set from Harbor Freight and they've saved my ass more times than I can count, though your file trick is a solid backup when things go sideways.