so ive been on HF for about 12 years now and done some satellite work but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i keep telling myself ill look into someday. well someday is apparently now because i spent last weekend going down a rabbit hole and now im more confused than when i started.

from what i can piece together youre basically looking at either a big dish or a yagi array, a high power amp, and an extremely low noise preamp right at the feedpoint. the path loss on 2m EME is something like 252 dB which is just an insane number to think about. most of what ive been reading says the minimum viable setup on 2m is probably 4 yagis and 500 watts or thereabouts, but then i see guys making contacts with a single long yagi using JT65 so im not sure where the floor actually is these days with digital modes.

i guess my main question is — if you were starting from scratch on a modest budget and already had a decent 2m transceiver, what would you prioritize first. the antenna or getting the preamp situation sorted. ive got room for a decent array but i live in a fairly rural area so noise floor shouldnt be too bad. any thoughts appreciated, even if its just pointing me at resources ive probably already found

the preamp question is actually more important than most people realize when theyre starting out. you can have a huge antenna and completely blow your system noise figure with a mediocre preamp or even decent coax running 20 feet before your first stage of amplification. get the preamp at the feed, full stop. a good low noise amp like the ones SSB Electronics used to make or the current offerings from Kuhne are worth every penny. you want your NF down around 0.3-0.5 dB range ideally and that only happens if its physically right at the antenna.

on the antenna side yeah single yagi EME is a thing now with JT65B and Q65 but youre going to be limited to working the big guns — stations running kilowatts into large dishes. which is fine honestly, you still make the contact. but if you want to work smaller stations too you need more antenna. i started with 4x17 element yagis on 2m and that felt like a reasonable entry point. could work maybe 60-70% of active EME stations on a good night. added two more yagis later and it made a noticeable difference.

also check out the WSJT-X documentation and specifically look at Q65 which has kind of taken over from JT65 for EME in the last few years. the sensitivity improvement is real.

i did my first EME qso about 8 months ago with a single 9el yagi and 400w. worked OH6UW who is a monster station obviously but it counted lol. honestly the software side of things (WSJT-X, good sound card, making sure your computer clock is synced to the millisecond basically) tripped me up more than the RF stuff. spent like two sessions just figuring out why my decodes were off and it turned out my GPS disciplined clock wasnt configured right in the software.

the moonrise/moonset windows matter too, when the moon is at low elevation you get some ground gain that can help a surprising amount depending on your terrain. theres a guy on one of the EME reflectors who did a whole writeup on optimizing for ground gain with modest stations, worth finding if you havent already