A low latency radio/baseband interface protocol is provided. In one embodiment thereof, 8b/10b encoding is used, which has distinct control characters and data characters. Control characters are used to define the beginning of a frame. More particularly, in accordance with one aspect of the invention, signaling between a baseband portion of a communications apparatus and a radio portion of the communications apparatus is achieved by encoding data units of a given number of bits into codes, each code being a data unit of a number of bits greater than the given number of bits. Multiple different types of data exchanges are defined, and a different code is assigned to each type of data exchange. For a given data exchange, a data exchange type is selected in accordance with data to be exchanged, and a message frame is formed in accordance with the data exchange type selected, the message including a code identifying the data exchange type. The message frame is then transmitted between the baseband portion and the radio portion.