I'm interested in getting one of the Essentials or Elite Field kits (or perhaps both) and just curious to get your input on which you'd recommend. Currently, I work as a freelance software developer for a few clients, as a contractor for one company doing Linux admin & software dev work to make sure the internet keeps running for a few pretty large service areas across the continental US. And I just mess around with security tools in my free time.
That said I like to figure out a way to make my hobbies sustain themselves, so I'm interested in doing freelance or contract pentest work. Which kit would you recommend for me? I've got plenty of homelab wireless and various machines to test stuff against in safe and legal ways.
I'm leaning towards the essentials /w the Nano because it's small, it has expandable storage, and could probably live on battery power longer. I've built a few MiniPwners from TL-MR3040v2 (and accidentally erased the root from at least one, totally disabling it, I couldn't even flash it from the UART) and imagine it's comparable to those regarding size and battery life, but with much more power and two external antennae. I'm also planning to upgrade to a Pixel soon and convert my Nexus 6 to a NetHunter machine which I imagine will be perfectly paired with the Nano.
That said, I've also connected 4 WNICs to a single laptop so I could dedicate a few channels to each when wardriving, so the power a Tetra provides is very desirable to me. Perhaps I'll get the Elite Kit and add an Elite Nano in the future.
I especially like that the Tetra supports both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz frequencies, and MIMO, it's not clear to me that the Nano does. The Nano also has expandable storage with an SD card and it's not clear to me that the Tetra does (although 2GB NAND is a huge amount of space compared to most networking hardware I've used, especially wireless platforms.)
I think I may have made this question too focused on the 6G Pineapple platforms for this subforum but the question still pertains to field kits, and as far as the actual hardware differences between the two it seems to be the pineapple. There are also a few accessory differences as well, the Elite seems to come with a 5 port switch, USB Ethernet, and several other extras that may be useful in various scenarios. Maybe that answers my question then... It's just a lot of stuff, I try to be a minimalist except for books and... I guess networking hardware.