I was talking to one of the local hams who has gotten in to meshtastic the other day and he said what was valuable about meshtastic was that it didn't need any infrastructure, whereas meshcore requires repeaters. So his conjecture is that meshtastic is more suitable for ad hoc emergency response.

Well as it turns out, you can do the same with meshcore. From your phone/terminal you go into the settings and check the box that says "repeater". It will move your MC device to 918mhz and that device will behave as both an interface for your phone and a repeater.

Here's what normal meshcore operation looks like.... on 910mhz using proper repeaters around you.

So the keypoint here is that meshtastic is for small adhoc groups and meshcore can readily be configured to behave in the same manner (although not interoperable with MT). If you want a small adhoc network, you can use MT or MC to accomplish this.

MT is /not/ scaleable though. Once you get over 10-15 people in vicinity of each other, the network saturates. So for a region the size of a county or state... or even multiple states, meshcore is the way to go.

Become the local folklore

Meshcore... over 23 hops.... from a kite into france.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFLW03ix144 stupid simple cooler / heater for your shop. It's not gunna knock any homeruns but it could help.