ESP NOW packets are dropped only when sending to a NodeMCU board after calling wifi.begin()

[Alex Rossouw]

I am stummped. On the reciever board, when I call wifi.begin() on a nodeMCU (Wroom32) it drops the espnow packets comming in from a dfrobot esp32C3. If I call wifi.disconnect() or comment out wifi.begin() the packets arrive 100% of the time.

Then I swapped the reciever board to also a dfrobot esp32C3, and even after calling wifi.begin(), espnow works with 0% packet loss...

I have set both boards to the same channel and mac is set perfect, no errors from init'ing the espnow, on all experiments.

Anyone got ideas why the nodemcu board is dropping packets like this while wifi is running?