so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seemed completely out of reach. like i just assumed you needed a massive dish and a kilowatt and a room full of preamps and DSP gear. but lately ive been reading more about the JT65 stuff and it sounds like maybe the barrier isnt as insane as i thought?

right now im running a pretty modest 2m setup, 100w into a single 9el yagi, which i know is nowhere near what people usually talk about for moonbounce. ive seen some guys mention doing it with 4 yagis and around 400w which sounds more achievable for me eventually. my main question is really what the weak link tends to be in a budget EME setup — is it the antenna gain, the power, or the receive side noise figure? because i feel like i could save up for a solid GaAsFET preamp pretty reasonably but adding antenna arrays is a whole other project. also is there a minimum elevation your antenna needs to reach, i ask because my yagi only goes to about 40 degrees and im not sure if that limits when the moon is accessible from my QTH.

any experience here appreciated, not looking to work DX6 entities on EME or anything just want to make a contact or two and say i did it

the receive side is huge, probably bigger than most people realize starting out. a mediocre preamp at the antenna will kill you even if you have a decent array. you really want noise figure under 0.5dB at the feedpoint, the difference between that and even 1.0dB NF is noticeable on EME signals because you have basically no margin to work with. i run a SSB Electronic preamp right at the mast and it made a real difference when i upgraded from my old unit.

on your elevation question — 40 degrees is actually fine for a lot of moonbounce windows depending on your latitude, the moon obviously moves around a lot. some guys at high latitudes struggle more with that than others. your real constraint with a single 9el is just the gain, youre looking at what, maybe 12-13 dBd? for JT65B you theoretically need around 23-24dB of total system gain in your link budget to work stations with similar setups, so either you need a big station on the other end or you need to stack. but honestly starting with JT65 and hunting for big gun stations isnt crazy, some of those guys are running serious hardware and can pull you out of the noise. i worked my first EME contact with less than ideal gear just because the other station had a massive dish.

yeah dont underestimate how much the software side has changed things. like 10 years ago EME was basically CW only if you were a small station and you needed big antennas just to get a signal through. now with WSJT-X and JT65B people are doing it with stuff that would have been laughed at before. i worked my first EME qso last winter, i have 4 x 9el M2 yagis and about 500w to them, preamp is a down east microwave unit mounted right at the power divider. it took a few months of weekends to actually log someone because the scheduling matters a lot, you kind of have to coordinate with the other station via the ON4KST chat so you know someone is actually pointing at the moon at the same time as you. the random CQ thing works sometimes but coordinating makes it way more likely especially with a modest setup. your 40 degree max elevation should work, just check when the moon peaks at your location and make sure its during a time you can operate