so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a decent amount of HF DX but a buddy of mine at the club just worked his first EME contact on 2m last month and now im completely obsessed with the idea. ive been reading everything i can find but honestly the more i read the more confused i get about where the realistic entry point is these days.

like i understand the basic concept, you bounce your signal off the moon, path loss is insane, you need a lot of antenna gain and usually some serious power. but what im not clear on is whether a single yagi setup is actually viable anymore or if you basically need a yagi array to work anything. ive got a decent sized lot and could probably put up a 4-yagi array on an az-el mount if i had to but that feels like a huge commitment before ive even made a single contact.

also the whole JT65B vs Q65 thing, is Q65 pretty much where everyone is now? i was running JT65 for meteor scatter a while back so im somewhat familiar with the modes but EME seems like a whole different animal in terms of timing and how you structure a QSO. any thoughts from people who have actually done this would be really appreciated, im in the midwest so not sure how that affects things either.

Q65 has basically taken over for EME yeah, at least on 2m. JT65B still works and you'll find stations running it but the activity on Q65-60A is where most of the action is now, especially for smaller stations. the timing thing does take some getting used to, you really need GPS disciplined timing or at least something pretty solid, even being off by a second or two can mess you up.

on the antenna question, single yagi EME is doable but youre going to be limited to working the bigger stations, the guys running 4x or 8x yagi arrays or dishes. some of those stations actively look for small stations to work so it's not hopeless, but your contact rate is going to be low. a 4x array on a proper az-el is kind of the sweet spot for getting into it seriously without going completely overboard. the az-el mount is probably the bigger headache honestly, getting something that tracks accurately and doesnt flex or bind is where people spend a lot of money. for power, 500-700w into that array is workable, you dont necessarily need a full legal limit although more is always better on EME.

midwest is fine by the way, youre not at any real disadvantage geographically for EME compared to the coasts, the moon doesnt care.

the timing thing caught me off guard too when i first started, i was using the windows clock synced to internet time and thought that was good enough but it really isnt, picked up a cheap GPS receiver and fed it into a timing program and suddenly things started decoding way better. that was like a year ago and still the best $30 i spent on this hobby probably.

also dont overlook your feedline situation, all that gain from a 4x array doesnt mean much if youre losing 2-3dB in lossy coax between the array and the shack. most serious EME ops run the preamp right at the antenna, like a good low noise preamp mounted on the boom, and then either hardline or LMR600 or whatever down to the shack. the noise figure of that first stage really matters on receive.