so ive been licensed for about 6 years now, mostly HF stuff, some VHF contesting here and there, and EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seems completely insane but also kind of amazing. bouncing signals off the moon. i mean come on.

anyway i started reading about it more seriously and im genuinely confused about where the baseline is. like i see some guys talking about working EME with a single yagi and 100w which sounds impossible to me, and then other guys with these massive dish setups that look like they belong at a university. so whats actually realistic for a first timer who doesnt have a farm to put antennas on. im in a suburban lot, maybe 60x100ft backyard, have a solid 144mhz setup already (ft-991a and a 9 element yagi for local VHF).

also how does the digital mode stuff work for this, ive heard JT65 mentioned a lot. is that basically mandatory now or do people still do CW moonbounce. genuinely curious how a contact even works logistically given the path delay.

yeah the single yagi EME thing is real but its almost entirely a JT65 or Q65 situation now. CW EME is still done but you basically need a serious array to hear anything that way, most of the old timers running CW have stacked yagis or dishes. for a suburban lot your best shot is probably 2 or 4 yagis on a decent az-el mount, which is still a real project but not completely out of reach.

the path delay on 144 is roughly 2.5 seconds each way so you dont hear your own signal coming back in any meaningful realtime sense, and the doppler shift moves around depending on where the moon is in its orbit so you have to correct for that. the logging software handles most of it honestly, WSJT-X has the EME features built in and it will calculate the doppler offset for you if you feed it your coordinates and the time is accurate.

realistically for your setup as-is, the ft-991a is fine but that 9 element yagi is going to be a tough ask even on JT65. people talk about minimum viable being around 100w and a longer yagi or small stack. the preamp situation matters a lot too, a good low noise preamp at the feedpoint makes a bigger difference than people expect. MGF1302 based stuff or a cavity preamp if you can find one. dont skimp there.

i did my first EME contact about two years ago on 2m with a pair of m2 xpol yagis and an old ic-910h running about 200w, so its definitely doable without a dish setup. took me forever to get the az-el mount sorted out and the preamp noise figure down to something reasonable but when i finally decoded a signal coming back from the moon i just sat there for a second like ok that actually worked.

Q65 has kind of taken over from JT65 for weak signal EME stuff, worth looking at that if you havent already. the sensitivity is better and it handles the doppler spreading a bit cleaner from what ive read, though honestly both work. the EME2 reflector and ping jockey are where people coordinate skeds, you basically arrange a time with another station and both point at the moon when its mutually visible. thats the other thing people dont think about — you need the moon above the horizon for both of you at the same time, so depending on where the other station is that window can be pretty short.