sorry… another ‘register_activation_hook’ problem

OK. I’m going crazy here. I’ve found a lot of threads devoted to the register_activation_hook function, but nothing with the problem I’m having.

I’ve been trying to create another table during installation of a custom plugin, but nothing was working. I put WP into ‘debug’ mode, but it doesn’t throw any errors other than

“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

My code looked something like

$wpdb->location_tracking = "{$wpdb->prefix}location_tracker";

function location_tracker_activate()
{
	global $wpdb;

	$create_table_sql = "
		CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->location_tracking} (
			id int AUTO_INCREMENT,
			lat float(10,6),
			lng float(10,6),
			primary key (id)
		)
	";

	require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/install.php');

	maybe_create_table($wpdb->location_tracking, $create_table_sql);

}
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'location_tracker_activate');

So, I’m now just trying to kill the process during my installation, but I just get the same result. Nothing ‘dies’, I just get

“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

function location_tracker_activate()
{
	die('WTF?');
}
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'location_tracker_activate');

Another strange thing is if I register a function that doesn’t exist, I have no errors thrown at all.
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'mungy_mungy_mungy');

I’m obviously doing something stupid… but what?

(Oh, and everything’s being declared in the main plugin file “wp-content/plugins/location_tracker/location_tracker.php”)