Detection would be a good start
Clearly, in addition to serious jail time for anyone doing this (what's the betting that even if caught they'll get a short suspended sentence) we clearly need better schemes for detecting drones in prohibited areas. And yes, this sort of thing is in my line of work.
Idea 1) Already mentioned by others is the idea of triangulating the locations of transmitters. For locating the drone (and thus warning pilots) this is probably not too difficult. Technology like VERA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VERA_passive_sensor) which relies on time difference of arrival could do this easily. A much simpler system than VERA would work fine since the range needed is limited and only a few frequencies need to be covered. Detecting the ground transmitters is a bit more challenging since the RF path is more obscured and of course you will get a lot of false positives but I thnk that a system, perhaps installed on current mobile phone masts would be possible. Of course, in both cases radio silence could be adopted with the drone operating automatically, but people who do this are by definition morons and therefore usually not clever enough to work that out.
Idea 2) Dedicated radar - Presumably, these drones are not currently showing up on airfield radars because (a) their radar cross section is too small and (b) their speed is too low and therefore the radar's Doppler filter removes them as clutter. But, in my professional opinion a suitable radar could be invented. It only needs to search a limited amount of space where aircraft are taking off and landing and it could use the no doubt very distinctive Doppler shift from the props as a discriminant so it doesn't keep detecting birds (like the counter helicopter mode on some military radars),
Biting the hand that feeds IT
