so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some meteor scatter on 6m, and i keep seeing people talk about EME and honestly it just sounds insane to me in the best possible way. bouncing signals off the moon. like what even is that.

anyway i started reading into it more seriously over the past few months and i guess my question is what does a realistic entry-level setup actually look like these days. i keep seeing people say you need a massive dish or like a 4x4 yagi array and a kilowatt and some kind of low noise preamp right at the feedpoint and honestly it sounds like it costs as much as a car. is that still true or has the digital mode stuff (JT65 i assume?) changed that at all. i have a pretty solid station already, running about 500w on 2m with a pair of M2 yagis stacked, and a decent SSB rig. wondering if thats even close to usable or if im way off base.

also curious how you even find people to work, like is there a specific calling frequency or do people schedule these things in advance. sorry if this is basic stuff, i just dont want to spend a ton of time going down the wrong rabbit hole before i at least understand what im dealing with.

your 2x yagi setup is actually not a bad starting point, honestly more people get into it that way than you'd think. the real game changer was Q65 and before that JT65 because the path loss to the moon and back is something like 252 dB on 2m, which is just a brutal number, but the digital modes let you pull contacts out of what sounds like pure noise. before that era you basically needed the big arrays or forget it.

the thing that matters as much as antenna gain is your system noise figure. like if you have a mediocre preamp 10 feet of coax away from the feedpoint you're throwing away so much of what your antenna is doing. a good relay-switched LNA right at the feedpoint, something with a noise figure under 0.5 dB ideally, that's where you want to spend money first in my opinion. even more important than adding a third yagi.

for scheduling and finding activity the EME2 reflector is still the main spot and people post their operating windows based on moon position, it's all coordinated around moonrise/moonset windows when the geometry works for both stations. there's also the WSJT-X software built around this stuff, grab that and start monitoring 144.120 when the moon's up and you'll hear activity pretty quick. 500w and a pair of yagis with a good LNA you could absolutely make contacts, might need patience but it's doable.

yeah what he said about the LNA is dead on, i was running a similar setup to yours and the single biggest jump i got was swapping to a good relay-switched preamp at the boom. coax loss at 2m isn't huge but it adds up and your receive noise floor is everything in EME.

one thing i'd add is don't underestimate the azimuth/elevation rotor situation. if you're just doing az you're gonna miss a lot of windows because the moon goes high enough that a fixed elevation mount just won't track it. i ran az-only for about a year and it was frustrating, kept missing the good geometry windows. getting a proper el rotor made a bigger difference to my actual contact rate than anything else i did to the antenna side. anyway good luck, first EME contact is genuinely one of those moments