Interesting. Seems possible then to send your own signals spoofing drone locations. You could fill the receiver with drones that are not there.

Yes. As always, the choice to not use encryption cuts both ways. No secrecy for the sender, but no guarantee of authenticity for the receiver.

Annoyingnoob seems to have the obvious quick and dirty solution: "overwrite" the real signals; obfuscate by sending out a blizzard of false signals to mask the rare true ones.

>DJI spokesman Adam Lisberg tells The Verge himself that he has been misinformed all along about how AeroScope works by his Chinese R&D colleagues

Thats really bad if they're even lying to each other internally how this works.

Much more likely they were just too lazy to audit/verify that it wasn't sending plaintext. It's also debatable whether encryption would be effective since the packets would need to be decrypted by the drone monitoring devices worldwide. At least the key could be changed in war zones though.