A walkie-talkie receiving a message should be a passive device no?

One can triangulate a radio broadcasting, I don't know how one would track receiving the broadcast.

A traditional FM walkie-talkie, yes, passive, but a P25/DMR handheld radio, especially operating in trunked mode, not necessarily. One notorious example of this is P25's use of packet retransmission requests: https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf

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.

They were Icom IC-V82s. A long discontinued VHF FM radio.

Interesting, thanks!

Its hard but its not impossible. Functionally you need some very accurate equipment and some knowledge of the receiver. This is one of those areas where the military and government likely have approaches that are secret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

If the walkie talkie remains a passiv listener, then no, but then it is also only half as useful. And a unmodified pager is a passive listener by default and cannot be tracked, which is why they were bought in the first place from Hezbollah.

Tracking radios like that is very hard when the signal is far away and in urban environments.

How would you track a pager? It's a receive only device

Maybe they once were. Are there features now like receipt confirmation?

There was for a while (Motorola ReFLEX), but it was never popular.[1]

The pagers in this case were very boring POCSAG receivers, no transmit capability.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX