so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some 2m weak signal, but ive always had EME in the back of my mind as kind of the ultimate goal. talked to a guy at our club last month who actually runs a 4x4 yagi array on 144 and he made it sound almost... doable? like not just for the big gun stations.

my situation is a suburban lot, no HOA thankfully, and i could probably put up a pair of long boom yagis if i go vertical stack. been looking at the K1FO designs and some of the stuff on the moon-net reflector. the software side seems okay, i already use WSJT-X for meteor scatter so JT65B or Q65 isnt completely foreign to me.

what i cant figure out is where the realistic floor is for actually making contacts. like if im running say 500w into a 2x9el setup what am i actually looking at. is this a thing where i need to wait for guys with massive arrays to point at me or can i work other small stations too. and the elevation rotor situation — do i need full az/el or can i get away with something simpler depending on my latitude. im in the midwest, roughly 43 degrees north if that matters.

any pointers appreciated, this forum has always been straight with me on this stuff

the 2x9el at 500w question is a real one and the honest answer is it depends a lot on what mode you're using. back when EME was mostly CW you'd have needed a much bigger array to do anything, but Q65 kind of changed everything. ive worked stations with 2x11el and 400w on 144 and the path was marginal but it worked. that said you're not going to be calling CQ and getting a pile, you'll be scheduling with specific stations and picking windows when the moon is high for both sides.

for the rotor situation at 43N you can actually get away with a lot. the moon gets high enough that a good horizon-to-horizon az rotor plus a manual elevation tilt or even a fixed elevation setup during a narrow window is something some guys do to start. its not ideal but people have made first EME contacts that way. eventually youll want az/el, the yaesu G-5500 is the go-to for a modest array and its not brutal on the wallet. the coax run matters a lot too, dont cheap out there or your noise figure goes to hell before you even get to the antenna.

yeah im in a similar boat, did my first EME contact about 8 months ago with a single long boom yagi and a medium PA. Q65B is just ridiculous in a good way, like i could not believe what was getting through. honestly the hardest part for me wasnt the RF side it was getting the az/el control working reliably and making sure my system clock was synced properly because if youre even a few seconds off it messes up the decode. the moon-net mailing list is still pretty active for scheduling, dont overlook that.