there has been several times where it tells me "No Service" when the GF standing next to me has 2 bars
But can she make calls. Motorola (pre-Google) used to be great with that. Their cheaper phones reported about 2 bars if you were within a galaxy or so of a cell tower, but you needed 5 out of 5 bars to make a call.
There are no standards. What your N5 may show as 1 bar mine may show as 3 bars, but you may be getting better reception.
I have yet to have a static issue
You won't - this is digital. Either the packet is received and you hear what's in it, or it's not received (not completely - if one bit is missed, it's "not received") and you hear silence. On CDMA there's an in-between situation, where you're on the ragged edge of reception, and the signal sounds as if it's under water, but on GSM it's either there or not. (It's very seldom that a GSM signal "goes digital".)
But it does sound as if 1) Your carrier isn't giving you much signal where you are and 2) the N5 isn't great on weak signals. That's why I always tell people to pick the carrier first. I don't care how cheap the plan is, how many minutes you get or how cheap that great new phone is - if there's no signal, your phone is a paper weight. My $400 Sprint phone didn't pick up a whisper in my niece's house. Her son's $10 Tracfone (on AT&T) works great, even in the basement. So he had (until I switched to AT&T) the better phone. His worked, mine didn't, and to me, "worked" is better than "didn't work".