so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when conditions are good, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of EME. like the concept that you can bounce a signal off the moon and have someone on the other side of the planet hear it is just... i dont know it never gets old to me even after reading about it for years.

anyway i started actually pricing this out and talking to a few guys at the club who have done it and i'm getting pretty overwhelmed. one guy says you need at least a 4 yagi array on 2m to have any realistic chance, another says you can do single yagi with JT65 if youre patient. im running an IC-9700 already so the radio side should be okay i think, but the antenna situation is my main question. also heard you need a pretty low noise preamp right at the feedpoint and the coax run needs to be short or youre throwing away gain. is that accurate? and whats a realistic expectation for first contacts, like how long did it take you guys before you actually logged an EME qso

yeah the single yagi guys arent wrong but they're also not telling you the full story. with JT65 and a single long yagi like a 9el or bigger you can work some of the big gun stations, the ones running 4x8el arrays or dishes, but you're basically dependent on them hearing you. your own receive is going to be marginal and youll miss a lot of the smaller stations. the IC-9700 is fine, solid radio for this, but the preamp thing is absolutely real. you want your noise figure down around 0.5 dB or less and it needs to be at the antenna, not in the shack. a good masthead preamp makes a bigger difference than adding another yagi honestly. coax from there to the shack matters less once youve got a low NF upfront but you still want good quality hardline if the run is more than like 20 feet.

first contact timeline really depends. if you get on during a big contest like the ARRL EME contest weekend youll probably work something within the first session because thats when the big pistols are actively calling CQ and sweeping for contacts. outside of contest weekends it can take longer just because youre waiting for mutual windows and the activity level drops off a lot.

this is something i went through last year actually. ended up building a 2x9el cross yagi setup for 2m, took me like 4 months to get everything sorted and honestly the mechanical side of pointing the antenna accurately was more of a headache than the RF stuff. you need decent azimuth and elevation control and the moon moves faster than you think especially at lower elevation angles. i was using a cheap rotator combo at first and the az accuracy was way off, kept missing windows.

my first actual QSO was about 6 weeks after i got everything on air, worked a station in Japan during a contest weekend, cant remeber which one now. the signal was barely there on the waterfall but JT65 decoded it and we got the exchange done. kind of anticlimactic but also not at all if you know what i mean. anyway dont underestimate how much time you spend just on the mechanical and pointing software side of things, that was my biggest surprise