What is the most tricky part in device troubleshooting ?

My experience says "If

a problem happens in the middle of doing something, it is relatively easy to fin
d the root cause and troubleshoot it (probably I might have over-simplified the
situation -:), but if something happened before anything started, it would be a
nightmare." For example, you set the all the parameters at thenetwork emulator f
or a UE you want to test and then turned on the UE. In a several second UE start
booting and then in a couple of second you see a couple of antenna bars somewhe
re at the top of UE screen.. and then in several seconds you see 'SOS' or 'Servi
ce Not Available' in stead of your network operator name displayed on your scree
n and normal Antenna bars. This is what I mean by "problem in the middle of doin
g something". In this case, if you collect UE log and equipment log, at least yo
u can easily pin point out the location the problem happens and start from there
for further details. But what if you are in this situation ? you set the all th
e parameters at the network emulator side and turn on the UE.. UE start booting
up .. showing the message saying "Searching Network ...." and got stuck there..
with no Antenna bars .. not even 'SOS' .. just saying "No service". And I collec
ted UE side log and Network Emulator side log, but no signalling message. This i
s where our headache starts.
As examples,
i) What if you don't see 'RRC Connection Request' when your turned on the WCDMA
UE ?
ii) What if you don't see 'Channel Request' when your turned on the GSM UE ?
iii) What if you don't see 'RACH Preamble' when your turned on the LTE UE ?
First thing you have to do is to understand the every details of this procedure
not only in the higher signaling layer, but also all the way down to the physica
l layers related to these first step. And also you have to use proper equipment
which can show these detailed process. If you have an equipment that does not pr
ovide the logging or it provides log but only higher layer singnaling log, it wi
ll be extremly difficult to troubleshoot. Given that you have the proper tools,
the next thing you have to be ready is to understand the detailed knowledge of t
hese process. Without the knowledge, however good tools I have it doesn't mean a
nything to me. So ? I want to teach myself here about the first step of LTE sign
aling which is RACH process. (Somebody would say there are many of other steps e
ven before the RACH, like frequency Sync, Time Sync, MIB/SIB decoding.. but it p
ut these aside for now.. since it is more like baseband processing).