so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly HF stuff and some 2m weak signal but a buddy of mine worked his first EME contact last month and now i cant stop thinking about it. i know its a massive rabbit hole but im trying to figure out what the bare minimum realistic setup looks like for 2m EME these days with JT65 and WSJT-X making it more accessible than it used to be.

right now i have a yaesu FT-897 which i know isnt ideal, and a single 11 element yagi up about 25 feet. i realize thats probably not gonna cut it but i dont even know what the threshold is. ive been reading about guys running 4 yagi arrays with a kilowatt and even then its not easy. is there any realistic way to do this with more modest gear or am i just dreaming. also what does a low noise preamp situation look like for this, i know that the feedline loss before the LNA is like the most critical thing but im fuzzy on exactly how people set that up physically.

not looking to work the world overnight just want to understand what a realistic first contact actually requires in terms of the link budget i guess

ok so the good news is its more doable now than it used to be, the bad news is a single yagi at 25 feet on 2m EME is still going to be a real uphill fight even with JT65. the path loss is around 252 dB depending on moon distance and youre fighting that with everything you have. realistically most people doing single yagi EME are running something like a 17+ element long boom yagi with a full legal limit amplifier, and even then you're counting on the other station having a serious array.

the preamp thing is exactly as critical as you've read. you want the LNA physically at the feedpoint, like literally mounted at the connector on the boom, because even half a meter of coax before it adds noise you cant get back. most people use a relay setup that switches the LNA in on receive and bypasses it on transmit. SSB Electronic and Kuhne both make good units but there are also some solid homebrewed designs from W6PQL that people have had good results with. the noise figure matters a lot, you want under 0.5 dB ideally.

your 897 actually isnt terrible for this as a starting point, the IF is fine for feeding into WSJT-X, just make sure youre running it into a decent soundcard interface. the antenna is really where you need to invest first though. single yagi EME contacts happen but you need everything else dialed in perfectly and youre relying on big stations on the other end.

did my first EME qso about two years ago with a 4x9el array and an old beko amp pushing around 600w. took me probably three months of failed attempts before i actually completed a contact and even then the other guy was running like 4x20el with a kw so he was doing most of the heavy lifting lol. the moon window thing catches people off guard too, you cant just point at the moon anytime, you need it above the horizon for both stations at the same time which depending on where you both are might only be a couple hours. i use WA4NJP's EME planner and the stuff built into WSJT to figure out windows. honestly the community is really friendly about it, there are skeds you can arrange through the moon-net reflector where big gun stations will specifically try to work smaller setups, thats probably how id suggest getting your first contact rather than just calling CQ into the void