so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and EME has always been kind of this mythical thing i thought was only for guys with huge yagi arrays and serious real estate. recently started reading more into it and apparently with JT65 and modern weak signal modes things have changed a lot from the old days of needing 100 foot dishes and kilowatts just to hear anything.

my current setup is a 144mhz station, running about 200w into a pair of M2 5WL yagis stacked. antenna gain is somewhere around 18-19dBd i think. i keep reading conflicting stuff about whether that's enough to actually make contacts or if im just going to hear the big guns and never get through. also the preamp situation confuses me a bit — everyone says get the preamp at the feedpoint but im not totally clear on what noise figure i should be shooting for. .5dB? lower? does it matter as much if im running low power anyway?

also curious if anyone has done EME from a suburban lot. i have pretty decent horizon to the east and south which i think is when moon is most usable but there are some houses maybe 15-20 degrees elevation in that direction so im not sure how badly that hurts. anyway just looking for a reality check before i start throwing money at this

your stack should be enough to get started, honestly. the game changed a lot when JT65B became the standard and then guys moved to Q65 more recently — i made my first EME contact with a single long yagi and 150w which would have been completely laughable in the cw EME era. you'll hear signals you can't work and that gets frustrating but contacts are definitely possible.

on the preamp question — you really do want to be under 0.5dB NF at the feedpoint, like as close to 0.3 or even lower if you can swing it. at 2m EME your system noise temp matters enormously because the signals are right down in the mud. SSB Electronics used to be the go-to but there are some good homebrew VLNA designs floating around too. Italab makes decent units. the difference between a 0.3dB and a 0.8dB preamp at the mast is actually meaningful when you're this close to the noise floor.

the horizon obstruction at 15-20 degrees is annoying but not fatal. moon windows are still usable above that, it just shortens your operating time and you miss some of the lower elevation passes. plenty of guys work EME from less than ideal situations. the main thing is tracking software — get something like Moon Sked or WXtrack running so you know exactly when the geometry is favorable for the path you want to work.

cant speak to all the technical stuff as well as some guys but i started EME about 2 years ago from a pretty normal neighborhood and it works. my setup is probably comparable to yours. the thing that surprised me most was how the scheduling and the community around EME works — theres a whole network of guys who post skeds on the online EME sked pages and if you post that youre available a lot of the big stations will actively try to work you because they want the contact too. so you're not just randomly calling into the void.

Q65 is where most of the activity is now on 2m at least from what i see. JT65B still used but Q65-60A seems like where the serious weak signal guys have landed. get WSJT-X set up and just spend a few sessions listening before you try to transmit, you'll learn a lot about the timing and the sequence just from watching.