Hi,
In case of the Red Pitaya SDR transceiver, it's a command to enable or disable the transmitter output and eventually to drive a relay that switches the antenna between the RX path or TX path and/or to control an external amplifier.
The only thing that's close to this is the UHD auto TX/RX switching
It's not really exposed as a different method / function on the gnuradio level, it's handled internally by the hardware / low-level driver.
Basically when the hardware doesn't receive any TX sample (i.e underflow), then the hardware is in RX mode. When it starts receiving TX samples, then it auto switch to TX mode (and stops receiving and sending data to the host).
Cheers,
Sylvain