What sort of radio signal are telephone calls and SMS texts?

Question

I have been studying how radio signals work lately trying to get my ham radio license. I then realized that phone calls and texts are essentially radio signals. What sort of signal are they? What frequencies do cell phones calls operate on? Is there a way to intercept and decode sms text messages using some sort of reciever? How are they encoded and decoded? This is just for hypothetical reasons. I have no interest in trying to intercept phone calls or anything.

In: 5

Answer 1

Radio plans vary by continent:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands)

Protocol signaling, encoding, duplexing, multiplexing and modulation varies by technology. On 4G and 5G both TDD and FDD duplexing schemes are used, OFDM multiplexing schemes are used to share radio resources amongst many users.