so ive been licensed for about 8 years mostly doing HF stuff and some weak signal VHF but ive always been fascinated by moonbounce and i think im finally at a point where i want to seriously try it. the problem is every time i start reading about what you need it kind of spirals out of control and i get overwhelmed and go back to working 40m or whatever.

from what i understand the minimum viable setup on 2m EME is something like a decent sized yagi or array plus a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and then you need to be running JT65 or Q65 these days? i was reading some old stuff about CW EME and that seemed absolutely brutal, like guys running kilowatts into arrays of 4 yagis for hours to make a single contact. is that still a thing or has digital basically taken over.

my biggest question is honestly the antenna. i have maybe room for a single long yagi on a good az/el mount — thinking like a 9 or 10 element on 2m but i dont know if thats enough to even hear anything. my lot is decent, no trees in the way of the moon path, and i have a good view to the east and south which i think matters for lunar windows. anyone actually done EME with a minimal single yagi setup or is that just a fantasy

yeah so the single yagi situation is tough but not impossible with Q65 these days. i ran a 2m EME sked last fall with a guy who was using a single M2 2MXP28 on an az/el, so 28 elements, and he could hear the big stations fine but struggled to complete with smaller setups. the math is brutal — you're dealing with path loss of around 252 dB on 2m and the moon is not a great reflector, maybe -3 dBsm or something in that range, so every dB of antenna gain you can squeeze out actually matters a lot.

the preamp situation is honestly just as important as the antenna. you want something with a noise figure under 0.3 dB right at the feedpoint, no exceptions. any feedline loss before the LNA just kills you. guys running SSB Elektronik or cavity preamps right at the boom see a huge difference vs even a short run of good coax first. on transmit the LNA needs to either switch out or be protected but you probably know that.

CW EME is still very much alive but you're right that it's mostly the big guns. i've heard W5LUA on CW EME and it's just a completely different world, stacked yagi arrays, legal limit, the whole deal. for a newcomer Q65-60A is the way to go, the integration time really helps pull signals out. get on the ping jockey site and watch the activity before you even get on the air, you'll learn a lot just from that.

i got my first EME contact about two years ago with basically a minimal setup, single 17 element yagi homebrew on a TV rotator i modified for elevation control, definitely not ideal. took me a while to get a complete but it happened. the key for me was picking the right window when the moon was at perigee and finding a patient operator with a big station on the other end who was willing to go slow with Q65.

one thing nobody told me that i wish i knew earlier — the az/el accuracy actually matters more than you'd think. like my rotator setup had some slop in it and i was probably losing a couple dB just from not being pointed exactly right. moon noise is a real thing you can use to verify you're actually peaked on the moon, if you have a way to measure system noise you can literally see it go up when you're pointed right at the moon vs a few degrees off. anyway dont let perfect be the enemy of getting started, something is better than nothing