Of course they can, just not as easily or conveniently.
EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.
EDIT: I meant walkie talkies. Old school pagers probably can't. Also I guess if you just use walkie talkies to listen to instructions. The station broadcasting can be tracked, however.
One can triangulate a radio broadcasting, I don't know how one would track receiving the broadcast.
A lot of worksite-oriented handheld radios these days are not just oldschool FM and use digital protocols to efficiently manage bandwidth, which can involve transmitting when not actually sending voice data. I haven't seen any confirmation of whether the affected devices were digital or not, but if they were buying COTS radio equipment there's a decent chance that they were.
The pagers in this case were very boring POCSAG receivers, no transmit capability.