digital waveform

It's done all the time. GSM Mobile phones are the classic example. All the transmissions to and from including SMS, MMS, Voice, and Control Messages are sent as a digital signal.

Data over radio is easy enough to do these days. The breaking factors are transmission bandwidth.

Narrow band transmissions(2.5 khz Deviation 12.5khz bandwidth) can deal with 2400 baud but needs good propagation and neat CRC algorithms to be successful.

Spread Spectrum (over 100Mhz bandwidth) affords much higher baud rates but again CRC algorithms need to take into account the peculiar properties of Spread Spectrum propagation.

MPT Trunking(or Johnson Trunking) two way radios use digital encoding to "steer" the radio across a network. This is almost transparent to the radio operator. It doesn't preclude transmitting other data at the same time.

Back in 1989, I worked for a company called Cabcall Taxi Services, (Later known as Mobile Communications International) We did Computerised Booking and Despatch systems for primarily the Taxi and Courier industry. We automated much of the booking and despatch process. With data terminals in the vehicles. We even did Vehicle Tracking utilising Differential GPS.

All this on 1200baud modems using whatever radio system infrastructure was in place and we had plenty of headroom to play with.

Unfortunately this was in Australia at a time, where these sorts of things "can't be as good as overseas". So it all came to an end.

Other examples you might like to look for is Hanson Concrete (Formally Pioneer Concrete) Status Automator system for their Concrete trucks. Utilising the company's Trunking radio network, GPS and vehicle operating status(loading,travelling,waiting,unloading) are automatically sent back to the central control. The central command can send messages the driver to query any anomalies.

RDS is another example of data over radio, where the broadcast radio stations ID or Logos digitally superimposed on the FM transmission, subsequently decoded in the receiver.

RFID is also digital over radio though it tends to be near field stuff.

Hope that helps.