Xebia’s Doomtenna switches from Meshtastic to MeshCore, reaches 60 kilometers

Xebia’s roof-mounted Doomtenna changed more than its firmware in January 2026. The Hilversum office node moved from Meshtastic to MeshCore, and the team said the new setup let it ping a home 60 kilometers away, a distance it had not reached with Meshtastic.

That result matters because Doomtenna was never a toy build. Xebia described it as a solar-powered LoRa node running on the roof of its Hilversum office as part of a long-term experiment in decentralized messaging. The goal was a WhatsApp-like experience that could keep working when normal infrastructure failed, and the node had already been in place for months by the time Xebia wrote about it in December 2025.

The hardware had already evolved once before the stack change. Xebia moved the core from a LILYGO TTGO T-Beam to a RAK5005-O plus RAK4631, saying the nRF52-based setup could cut power consumption by 90% to 95% compared with ESP32-based hardware. For a solar installation, that is not a nice-to-have; it is the difference between a node that survives the week and one that survives the season.

What Xebia found after running Doomtenna in the real world was that the software stack itself shaped the network as much as the radio did. Meshtastic’s own design is built around controlled rebroadcasting, with messages retransmitted up to three times if no device acknowledges them. Its documentation also recommends sticking to CLIENT, CLIENT_MUTE, or CLIENT_BASE unless there is a specific reason to do otherwise, because role selection and routing behavior affect how much load the network carries.

That discipline is exactly where Xebia said Meshtastic started to feel limiting. The team argued that Meshtastic is more sensitive to configuration mistakes, especially when a node is given the wrong role or when routing behavior is left to work against the layout of the mesh. They also pointed out that Meshtastic typically defaults to three hops, while MeshCore allows many more by default. In a sparse network, that can be the difference between a useful reach and a dead zone.

Meshtastic’s LongFast preset, with 250 kHz bandwidth and spreading factor 11, is designed to keep airtime under control, and Meshtastic has said users may outgrow LongFast in larger or denser meshes. MeshCore takes a different approach, pushing operators to manage compliance and behavior more consciously. Its own docs split the ecosystem into repeaters, room servers, and companion devices, and its April 19 release added default scope support plus a new get/set duty-cycle command.

That is the real lesson in Doomtenna’s migration. After months of rooftop operation, a wardriving pass in January, and a hardware redesign aimed at power savings, Xebia did not switch because Meshtastic was novel enough or MeshCore was fashionable. It switched because a sustained deployment exposed the hard parts: maintenance, routing, power draw, and control. On that roof in Hilversum, the winning metric was not nostalgia. It was whether a packet could get 60 kilometers away and still come back alive.