Is there any way to get to the chatter between the phone and the cell tower?
ADB shows certain things that the phone is doing in relation to signal, etc. though it would be great to be able to see the negotiations and full chatter between the phone and then being able to manipulate those logs.
I know on telit modules, you could debug the full output of the radio layer chatter, but being able to do it via the Android SDK would be a cleaner solution.
You can use logcat in adb shell to see the chatter between the radio and cellular network as well the chatter between radio and the operating system.
Type adb logcat -b radio > filename.txt in adb shell. It allocates a separate buffer for the radio log.
Have a look at http://developer.android.com/tools/help/logcat.html for more details.