so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF and some 2m weak signal but ive been reading about EME for a while and i think i want to actually try it. been using WSJT-X for a couple years so the digital modes arent totally foreign to me but i really dont have a good grasp on what the minimum viable setup looks like for actually making contacts on moonbounce.

right now i have a single 11el yagi on 2m, an IC-9700, and a pretty quiet rural location. i know people say you need a big array to do EME but ive also seen mentions of JT65 making it possible with smaller stations. is one yagi actually going to get me anywhere or am i just wasting time pointing at the moon. and what about the LNA situation — i have a cheap preamp right now but im wondering if i need something like an SSB Electronics unit or a Kuhne to actually pull weak signals out of the noise.

also completely unclear on how moon tracking works in practice. do people just use like a rotor controller tied to software or is there more to it than that. sorry if these are dumb questions, ive read a bunch but there seems to be a lot of assumed knowledge in the EME community

not dumb questions at all, EME has a pretty steep learning curve and the old timers dont always explain the basics well. so the short answer on your yagi situation is — one 11el can actually work with JT65 if youre patient and you pick your contacts carefully. you want to be working stations that have big arrays on the other end, like 4x9el or larger, because they can pull you out even when your signal is marginal. EMElog and the ON4KST chat are basically essential, you want to be coordinating ahead of time rather than just calling CQ into the void.

the LNA thing is probably your biggest weak point honestly. a cheap preamp with a mediocre noise figure is going to hurt you more than the antenna situation in some ways. Kuhne makes good stuff and so does SSB Electronics, aim for something under 0.5dB NF if you can and get it as close to the feedpoint as possible, every bit of coax between the antenna and the LNA is killing you. the IC-9700 has decent receive sensitivity but you still want a good external preamp in the chain.

for tracking i use a Green Heron controller with PstRotator software, it polls the moonrise/set data and keeps the beam pointed automatically. works great once you get it dialed in. just make sure your rotor can handle the elevation too if you want to track through the full arc, some people just use azimuth and catch the moon near rise or set when its lower but its easier with full az/el.

yeah what he said about the LNA is spot on. i tried EME for the first time last year with a borrowed 4x4el array and an older SSB Electronics preamp and even then i was struggling on receive. the path loss on 2m EME is something like 252dB which sounds insane when you type it out, and it kind of is. JT65A is doing a lot of heavy lifting but you still need the fundamentals right.

one thing nobody mentioned to me when i was starting out — polarzation is a real thing on EME and can bite you. Faraday rotation means your linear polarized signal is going to be rotated by the ionosphere in a way thats constantly changing so sometimes youre just crossed with the other station and the signals drop into the noise regardless of everything else. some people go full circular polarization to deal with it, others just accept there will be times when the path is degraded. worth knowing about before you get frustrated wondering why a supposedly strong DX station is suddenly unworkable.