so ive been a licensed ham for about 6 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m SSB when conditions are good, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of EME. bouncing signals off the moon just sounds insane to me and i want to try it before i get too old to climb towers lol

the thing is i dont really know where to start in terms of gear. ive seen people say you need a massive yagi array and a kilowatt and a really low noise preamp and all this stuff, but then i also see people talking about JT65 and working EME with like a single yagi? which is it, is there a realistic minimum setup or are those single yagi guys just super lucky

right now i have an IC-9700 which i know is decent for weak signal work, and i have a 9 element M2 yagi thats mostly used for satellite. feedline is about 40 feet of LMR-400. is any of that usable as a starting point or am i basically starting from scratch for EME

any input from people actually doing this would be great, im not in a hurry just trying to understand the scope of what im looking at

your IC-9700 is actually a solid foundation, dont sell that short. the receiver is decent and it does JT65 just fine through a computer. the 9 element yagi is the part that'll limit you the most -- for single yagi EME on 2m you really want something in the 15 to 17 dBd range minimum if you want to work more than just the big gun stations. a single 9el isnt going to hear much of anything except when you've got a perfect moon window and the other guy has a huge array pointed right at you.

the LNA placement matters a lot, probably more than people realize when they're starting out. you want your preamp at the feedpoint, not in the shack -- every tenth of a dB of noise figure counts when youre trying to pull signals out of the noise floor that are like -25 dB or worse. something like an SSB Electronics or a homebrew GaAsFET preamp with around 0.3 to 0.5 dB NF is what most people are running.

realistically with a single longer yagi, low noise preamp and JT65 you can work EME contacts. it wont be easy and youll spend a lot of time calling with no response but it does happen. check out the ON4KST chat during the ARRL EME contest weekend, thats where people coordinate skeds and youll get a feel for whos active and what stations they can hear

yeah same boat as you like two years ago, ended up going down a deep rabbit hole. i started with a single 17el yagi i built from the K1FO design and a cheap Chinese LNA that turned out to have about 1.2 dB NF which isnt great but workable. worked maybe 15 or 20 stations in the first year mostly through skeds arranged on the chat, none of it was random CQ stuff, you just dont hear random CQs with a small setup.

one thing nobody told me and i had to figure out the hard way -- azimuth and elevation accuracy is really important. i was off by a few degrees on elevation and it was killing me. moon noise is actually a useful tool for peaking your antenna because you can hear the noise floor change as you hit the moon, kind of cool when it works. anyway im now running 4x17el and its a totally different experience