so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair amount of HF DX, some 6m sporadic-e stuff, and lately been messing around on 2m SSB trying to work stations out to maybe 1200km or so via tropo. but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that seemed completely out of reach for normal people with normal budgets.

then i started reading about the JT65 mode and how people are apparently doing single yagi EME on 2m and actually making contacts and i dont know if thats real or if those posts are from like 2005 and things have moved on. are people actually doing this with modest stations or is it still basically the big dish crowd making all the contacts and everyone else just hearing noise.

also genuinely dont know what the minimum viable setup looks like. i have a IC-9700 which i think is reasonably capable on 2m, and i could probably get a 9 or 11 element yagi up without too much trouble. preamp, obviously, but is a good masthead LNA actually enough or are you fighting your coax losses so hard that it doesnt matter. and the moon tracking piece, do people actually use az-el rotators for this or is there some cheaper approach that works well enough for occasional contacts. sorry for the scatter shot questions, just trying to figure out if this is a rabbit hole worth jumping into

yeah single yagi EME on 2m is absolutely real, people do it regularly. the weak signal digital modes basically changed everything for small stations. Q65 has kind of taken over from JT65 for EME at this point so make sure you're current on that, the WSJT-X software handles it and it gives you a bit more margin than JT65 which matters when you're running minimal antenna.

the IC-9700 is a solid starting point, its receive performance is decent but you really do want a good LNA right at the feedpoint, like 0.3-0.5dB NF territory, because your system noise figure is basically the whole game. something like a SSB Electronic or a DG0VE style unit, plenty of options. and yes keep your coax run short or go with heliax if you can because every tenth of a dB actually shows up in whether marginal stations decode or not.

for tracking honestly yes you want an az-el setup for serious work, trying to hand-crank it or guess at moon position is frustrating fast. a yaesu G-5500 is the classic combo, used ones come up on qrz classifieds pretty often. pair it with some free tracking software like MacDoppler or PstRotator and youre set. its not cheap to do right but its not a giant dish either. done properly a 9 or 11el yagi station can work hundreds of stations over time, you just accept that youre the small gun and some days the big stations dont hear you

i built up a small EME station a couple winters ago, 2x9el cross yagis on 2m with the 9700 and a chinese LNA i replaced pretty quick after i actually measured its NF and it was... not what they claimed. anyway once i got a proper SSB electronic preamp in there the difference was pretty obvious just listening to the moon noise, which is one of the ways you sanity check your system actually.

the tracking thing is genuinely important more than i expected. i tried doing it manually at first just running the rotator by hand following an app on my phone and it works but youre constantly fiddling with it instead of operating. got a G-5500 secondhand and wired it up to PstRotator and now it just follows the moon and i can actually pay attention to the screen. made my first EME contact about 3 weeks after getting the tracking sorted which felt pretty wild honestly. station in germany decoded me on the first attempt which i was not expecting at all