so ive been licensed about 6 years now and EME has always been this thing on my bucket list that felt completely out of reach. started looking into it more seriously the last couple months and honestly its a bit overwhelming. like i understand the basic concept, signal goes up hits the moon comes back, path loss is insane, you need serious antenna gain and low noise receive setup. but thats about where my understanding gets fuzzy.

right now i have a 4-element yagi on 2m that i use for regular weak signal work, can make contacts out to maybe 800-900 miles on a good tropo night. obviously that is nowhere near EME territory. been reading about folks running big yagi arrays, like 4x8el or even 4x17el setups, and some guys doing it with dish antennas. seen a few references to 100w being usable with JT65 if your antenna system is good enough but i dont really know if thats realistic or just optimistic talk.

is there a practical minimum setup people actually use successfully these days? and whats the noise figure situation like, i know preamp at the feedpoint is basically mandatory but how low are we talking, like 0.3dB NF or can you get away with something a bit noisier. just trying to figure out if this is something i can realistically do without building a moonbounce station that takes over my entire backyard

okay so i've been doing EME on 2m for about 4 years now and the minimum viable thing really has changed a lot since the JT65 days, and then again with Q65 coming along. realistically the weakest stations i regularly work are running something like 4x9el yagis with maybe 500-600w at the feed and a decent preamp, probably 0.5dB NF or better. you can do it with less antenna if you make up for it with power and a really clean feedline situation, or vice versa.

the noise figure thing is important but people obsess over the last tenth of a dB when their coax run is killing them. preamp at the feedpoint is non negotiable yeah, and getting something in the 0.3 to 0.5dB range is good enough, the difference between 0.3 and 0.5 is pretty marginal in the real world. what kills people is a mediocre preamp sitting 20 feet of RG-213 away from the antenna, that wipes out any gain advantage you had.

100w with a really good antenna array can work, ive seen it, but you'll be limiting yourself to the big guns mostly and your window for contacts will be narrow. honestly if you can swing 4x17el and 500w or more you'll be in much better shape and able to work a wider range of stations. its doable without taking over your whole yard depending on your mounting situation, 4 yagis in a square isnt as massive as it sounds if you're already doing vhf contesting stuff

one thing nobody mentions when you start looking at EME is the mechanical headache of actually tracking the moon with any kind of accuracy. you can have all the RF sorted and then discover your azimuth elevation rotator system is the weak link. i went through two different controller setups before landing on one that tracks smoothly enough to not waste half my window chasing the moon around. something to think about early before you're committed to a particular antenna configuration because the mounting and tracking hardware can end up costing as much as the antenna itself depending what route you go