espnow (esp32, esp8266) uses wifi broadcast like upnp ?

[linux-works]

this was surprising to me.  anyone have any experience with 'espnow' so-called direct wifi comms?

I'm just trying it out and I'm not super happy with what I'm seeing.

I have 2 systems at home that seem to want to talk upnp (and no easy way to turn that crap off!) and when I run espnow as a listener, I'm seeing their broadcast CRAP on my incoming stream.  what the holy hell? 

I'm just trying to send ascii payload from one esp chip to another on my home wifi net.  I was doing a serial monitor of the Serial.print() stream and while most data comes across, I'm seeing broadcasts, in pure ascii, IN MY STREAM.  like the old ftdi-gate nonsense, but quite different.

I wonder if this can be turned off.  I'm not finding much info on it. 

the image shows my rasp pi running 'home assistant' and it seems that also wants to announce itself on raw wifi and its farking with my serial stream.  what the hell.  this is so wrong on so many levels.

the json stream is my stream.  its from a voltmeter and its just a json string of a set of measurements.  I want that stream and NOT nonsense junk from every charlie on the damned wifi.

[linux-works]

one more bit of info.  it seems that if I run my esp8266 listener and have my term emulator watch the output, the output is silent UNTIL I have a remote side (also esp8266) as an espnow sender.  it sends directly to the mac addr of my espnow listener (so I'm NOT using broadcast all FF addr!).  when the sender sends enough data packets, it seems to wake up or trigger some other upnp busybodies on the wifi lan and they start announcing themselves. 

if I stop the sender unit, the channel goes quiet again and I dont see those adverts.  so its only when my other peer sends data and others feel they have to join in to the 'party line'.

what a messed up scheme.  I might have to abandon the espnow idea (just as soon as I tried it).