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.

I was just reading up on meshtastic so i can speak intelligently at the ham club meeting tomorrow evening. The fundamental difference between MT and MC is that MT makes everyone a repeater. They realized this was far too chatty, so they introduced limited flood routing. So if you send a message, my node will repeat it. But if I have heard that same packet already repeated by someone else I will not repeat it. The fly in the ointment here is that what if a node in someone's pocket hears and repeats the message and the nearest strong station with a good antenna decides it doesn't need to replay that message?

Then they came up with another trick which is to have two special repeaters that hear packets on your local network and then quickly switch to a much slower datarate which can travel further. When the data arrives at the other end, another special repeater retransmits the message at the normal datarate locally to that end. BUT WAIT.... meshtastic isn't supposed to have infrastructure!!!!

They seem to be shooting from the hip here. They are trying creative things that over complicate things.

Meshcore on the other hand uses a faster datarate in which packets can travel 9 hops in 5 seconds. I'm routinely going to middle of south carolina to middle of Tennessee in 12 hops in about 7 seconds. Meshtastic is still experiencing a log jam of local redundant packets at 7 seconds.

https://www.austinmesh.org/about/meshcore-vs-meshtastic/

—— thanks chicken tender