so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF work, some VHF contesting, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seemed completely out of reach. lately ive been reading more about it and with JT65 and the weak signal stuff it seems like maybe its not as impossible as i thought when people were doing it with massive yagi arrays in the 80s.

my main question is really about the antenna side of things. i keep reading wildly different things about what the minimum viable setup looks like for 2m EME. some guys say you can do it with a single long yagi and 400 watts if youre patient enough, others are talking about 4x4 yagi arrays and kilowatt amps like its the bare minimum. i have a decent sized backyard but im not trying to build a moonbounce station that my neighbors will form a committee about, you know.

also curious what the actual contact experience is like, like do you just call CQ and wait for ages or is there some coordination that happens. ive seen references to the EME chat pages and stuff but havent really dug in. anyone actually done this from a modest setup, not a superstation

yeah single yagi EME on 2m is absolutely a thing, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i ran a 9el M2 for about two years before i went to a 4 yager array and made maybe 60-70 contacts, mostly on JT65B which is what you want to be using. the key thing people dont emphasize enough is your receive setup matters as much or more than the tx power. a good preamp right at the feedpoint, low loss coax or even go to hardline if the run is more than like 20 feet, and a clean RF ground situation. if your noise floor is garbage you wont hear the weak echoes coming back and nobody will hear you either.

for the coordination thing, look up the ON4KST chat, basically everyone doing EME is on there calling skeds and posting when theyre on. random CQ does work occasionally especially if you have decent eirp but most contacts especially as a small station happen through sked coordination first. the moon window obviously matters a lot, youre only able to work stations where the moon is above the horizon for both of you simultaneously so planning is kind of essential. N0UK has a good moon tracking page that a lot of guys use. its a rabbit hole but a really satisfying one once you get your first echo back off the moon

i did my first EME contact last year off a single 17el yagi and a solid state 500w amp, so it can be done. took me a while to get the az/el rotor situation sorted out, that was honestly the bigger headache than the antenna itself because you need accurate tracking or youre just pointing at sky. i used a cheap chinese az rotor and built my own elevation setup from scratch which was... an adventure. the software side with WSJT-X is pretty straightforward once you get your clock sync dialed in, that matters more than people realize, like even being a second or two off will mess up your decodes bad.