so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m weak signal occasionally, and ive had this itch to try moonbounce for probably the last two years. finally decided to actually look into it seriously instead of just watching videos about it.

my current 2m setup is a single 9el yagi and an IC-9700 which i know is not going to cut it for EME at all, at least not for any serious attempts. ive been reading that most people run big yagi arrays or dish antennas and the math on the path loss alone is kind of staggering when you think about it, like 252 dB on 2m is just... a lot.

so the question is what is actually the minimum viable setup to make a JT65 contact these days. i know the mode helps a ton compared to old school CW EME but there has to still be a floor somewhere right. ive seen people claim they worked EME with a single yagi and 100w but that seems optimistic unless they got lucky with conditions or the other station was running a monster array. anyone actually done it with modest gear or is this one of those things where you really need to invest heavily before you hear anything back

yeah the single yagi thing is real but there's a big asterisk on it. you can absolutely complete contacts on JT65B with a single long yagi like a 15-17el and 100-200w but you're basically dependent on the other station being a big gun. someone with a 4x yagi array or a 3m dish can hear you just fine when you're pointing at the moon, but you're not gonna hear them unless the geometry is good and everything lines up. the weak link is almost always your receive side.

the IC-9700 is actually a solid radio for this, good noise figure and the built in SDR stuff helps. what you really want to focus on first is a good preamp at the feedpoint, like an SSB Electronic or a Kuhne, something with a noise figure under 0.5 dB ideally. that single upgrade will do more for you than doubling your power output in a lot of cases. the path loss math is brutal but the JT65 modes really did open this up to stations that would have had zero chance in the CW days.

honestly just get yourself set up on 144.174 and watch the spots on the EME2 logger for a while before you even try transmitting. you'll get a feel for who's active and what kind of stations are making contacts on any given day.

i did my first EME qso last winter with a 2x9el cross yagi setup and maybe 300w at the feedline and it took me like three weekends of trying before i completed anything lol. not gonna lie it was frustrating but when it finally worked i was pretty stoked. the logging software and getting WSJT-X configured correctly took me longer than the antenna work honestly, there's a bunch of settings that have to be exactly right for the timing and the doppler correction stuff or nothing makes sense on the waterfall.

one thing nobody told me until after i was already set up is that moonrise and moonset windows are often better than when the moon is high because of the ground gain effect, basically the signal bounces off the ground in front of your antenna and adds a few dB. made a noticeable differnce for me anyway.