A radio is a modem that converts from one medium, wired serial, to another medium, wireless, on one end and then re-converts things back again on the other end.
Typically modems do not care about what information they carry, they're just donkeys or mules that carry the load, some kind of data. But with Modbus RTU where there is timing spec, a modem might be designed to handle an entire message at once, or to handshake wirelessly with its partner if a long message meeds to be split and to watch for the timing. The radio modem I used was a store and forward, with a built-in latency period. The time-out on the master had to account for latency (delay) in the messaging.
I discovered that some wireless modems handle either 7 bit data words or 8 bit data words, not both, and RTU uses 8 bit data words.