so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but a buddy of mine at the club keeps telling me EME is something else entirely and i should try it. did some reading and now im more confused than when i started honestly. like i understand the basic concept, bounce signal off moon, but the path loss numbers are just staggering. something like 250-260 dB on 2m? that cant be right can it

anyway from what ive gathered you need either a big dish or a long yagi array, a good low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and then software like WSJT-X running JT65 or Q65 to decode stuff that you would never hear otherwise. my current 2m setup is just a single 9 element yagi i use for local stuff and a cheap colinear on the roof. im guessing thats nowhere near enough but curious how far off i really am and what a realistic starter setup would look like without spending absolutely insane money

also how do contacts even work logistically, like do people schedule times on a cluster or something

yeah the path loss numbers are real and they are brutal, dont let that discourage you though because WSJT-X changed everything for smaller stations. before digital modes you needed a massive array just to hear anything, now guys are making contacts on 2m EME with 4 yagis and a decent preamp. the classic starting point people talk about is 4x17 or 4x21 element yagis in an H-frame, feeding them through a power splitter, and an SSB Electronics or similar LNA right at the boom. you want noise figure down around 0.3-0.5 dB if you can get it, every tenth of a dB matters on this path

your single 9 ele yagi is going to be a tough road, not impossible to hear some of the big guns with it but completing contacts would be very difficult. the transmit side matters too, most serious 2m EME ops are running 500-1000w to the feed. as for scheduling, yes people use the ON4KST chat and also the EME2 logger on MMMonVHF to arrange skeds, plus there are big activity weekends like the ARRL EME contest where random contacts happen without pre-scheduling. Q65-60A is what most people run now, it works even better than JT65 for this

i worked my first EME contact last year on 2m with a 2x9 el setup and an HL2.5FX amp putting out about 400w so it is doable on a modest station, just have to be realistic about who youre going to work. big stations in europe with 4x12m dishes and kilowatts, yeah they will hear you. other small pistols like yourself, thats going to be rough both ways. the moon window thing also took me a while to get my head around, you obviously need the moon above your horizon and ideally at a decent elevation, and the Doppler shift changes as the moon moves so WSJT handles that but you need accurate time sync like GPS disciplined or at minimum chrony running properly or the decodes just fall apart. lost a whole session once because my PC clock had drifted like 1.2 seconds, felt like an idiot when i figured it out