Double the mesh

I've spent the past year and a half or so tinkering with Meshtastic↗, an off-grid decentralized mesh network which operates on inexpensive LoRa1 radios. I started with the LILYGO T-Deck Plus↗; I was impressed by the Meshtastic capabilities but rather underwhelmed by the initially-compelling promise of a true standalone device. I then picked up a Seeed Studio T1000-E tracker↗, a rugged card-sized radio that's perfect for my everyday carry needs. I also added a RAKwireless RAK4631↗ with a big fuck-off antenna↗2 as a base station mounted up in my attic. It's been neat to connect with a bunch of folks on our local mesh, and I've even met some interesting meshers while traveling as well. But I recently decided I wanted to check out a newer mesh protocol called MeshCore↗. MeshCore is similar to Meshtastic in that it also runs a mesh on cheap LoRa radios, but the implementation is pretty different3. Meshtastic messages traverse the network because every node (by default) rebroadcasts every…