The question is purely academic, so there is no need to discuss the legality of the matter. :)
The drone is probably an advanced model, judging from the high altitudes it was hovering at the other day.
Would I need to know the exact make and model of the drone in order to know what band and exact channels its radio uses?
Followup question 0: would it be possible to make the jamming signal something legible, such as a song, for trolling reasons? Or does the signal have to be of a certain periodic kind? A certain sine wave?
Followup question 1: is the signal encrypted between the controller and the drone? If it is, I suppose there is no way to hijack the drone. Is it still possible to create noise that the drones receiver must pick up?
Followup question 2: if there was an old, unused 20 meter tall TV antenna within a 500 meter radius of said drone, would hooking my transmitter up to it help amplify the jamming signal? Or would the power requirements be ridiculously large in such an antenna, with all the added resistance? I never knew the technical specs of those.
You basically don’t:
The signal will be encrypted unless it’s a cheap one, I know the DJI and similar ones all use AES256 to encrypt communications to stop someone from being able to hijack and rob your drone
It will also use consumer bands like 2.4/5GHz and smart frequency hoping, so if you wanted to jam it you’re going to need to blast a quite powerful signal over a whole band (or two if it can hop to another band) which will probably take out a lot of WiFi and much other consumer wireless with it. I know you said no talking about legally, but you’d very quickly get at least the police at your door if you did this, jamming is quite illegal pretty much everywhere, and this would be quite obvious to authorities given there would be a pretty clear circle of the signal blackout and you’d be in the middle. Focused directional beaming is going to be tough for tracking a drone.
Do you mean an old TV broadcast antenna site? Well that’s even more illegal and might get the army instead of the police showing up if you tried to mess with it, given even “unused” ones might still be used for other things.
Either way, if you’re somehow able to evade capture and set something up, you’re still not gonna do much to impact the drone given the antenna will be tuned for entirely different radio bands than the ones the drones use, and most likely turn your transceiver into a bonfire if you send any kind of power into it
Edit: additional question about jamming with something in particular: anything the operator would see or hear? Basically no, you’d need to break the encryption to even stand a chance of that. There’s a lot of history about putting stuff into a jamming signal that other people with radios can see/hear in various ways, not sure people do much scanning of 2.4ghz since 90s cordless phones stopped being a thing though as I assume it’s mostly data (could be wrong though, I’ve not looked into it).
This is FCC territory.
Once had a neighbor with an amplifier (radio) setup that violated FCC regs for the frequency. He even bragged about it over the radio.
The energy levels were high enough that we could hear him on our stereo speakers (he was next door).
FCC knew about him, so they came and monitored for a couple days, then seized his equipment.
Probably got a nice fine too.
Wow! Thanks for sharing your knowledge on this! I’ve just started to learn electricity from scratch as a hobby project and to think that there was THIS deep a rabbit hole waiting for me within one of the branches of electromagnetism… Amazing.
Encrypted signal and smart frequency hopping? I guess my only academic choice left is to make one of those microwave canons. I think I has a spare oven in the cellar…
The police already knocked on my door once, when a passerby got worried and called them on me for having covered all my windows with Mylar sheets glued to Styrofoam for protection against the blazing sun. No more police visits for me, thank you. 😅
Ah when you said 20m high aerial before I incorrectly assumed you meant a 20m long monopole mast
Yagis are directional so not often used for general broadcasting as you usually just want everyone in a radius of the station to get the signal
If the yagi itself is not particularly large (say a meter long not particularly wide, usually around 10-15 elements), then chances are indeed that it’s originally for TV reception of some kind. If it’s only a few elements and/or on the bigger side, I’d be starting to suspect it’s something to do with amateur/ham radio