so ive been licensed for about 8 years now and mostly do HF but ive always had this thing about EME in the back of my head. started reading about it more seriously last month and honestly the rabbit hole goes way deeper than i expected. im on 2m right now with a pretty decent station, running about 400w to a 9el yagi which i know is nowhere near enough for traditional EME but ive been reading about the JT65B stuff and people saying you can work it with modest setups now.

my main question is really about antennas. i keep seeing people running 4x17el arrays or bigger and then others saying they got their first EME contact with a single long yagi. is the single yagi route actually realistic or is that just people being optimistic online. i have a decent sized yard but my neighbor situation is complicated so a big array might be a problem. also curious what kind of LNA people are actually running at the feedpoint, ive seen the Kuhne stuff mentioned a lot.

yeah the single yagi thing is real, im not gonna lie to you. i worked my first EME contact on 144 with a single 14el M2 and about 700w, took a while to find someone calling but it happened. the key is really the digital modes changed everything, JT65B especially. before that you basically needed a serious array to even hear yourself think off the moon.

the LNA question is important though and people underestimate it. you want as low a noise figure as possible right at the feedpoint, like within a foot of the connector ideally. im running a Kuhne MKU LNA 144 AH and its probably the best upgrade i made to the whole station honestly. NF around 0.3dB or something in that range. the coax loss between the antenna and your first amplifier kills you on receive and EME is very much a weak signal game so that front end noise figure matters more than another couple hundred watts on tx in a lot of cases.

what elevation range does your az-el setup cover, or are you still on a fixed mount trying to pick windows?

the neighbor thing is real and ive dealt with it too. one thing worth considering before you go down the big array path is that a single well-built long boom yagi like a 17 or 19 element on a decent az-el rotator is going to teach you a lot more about the mode than trying to phase four antennas together before you really understand whats going on. phasing harnesses and getting the polarization right and all that is its own whole project and if something is off you wont know if its the array or your setup or what.

also dont overlook the importance of a good az-el system. tracking the moon accurately matters, people cheap out on that and then wonder why their signal is inconsistant. I use an old Yaesu G-5500 which isnt perfect but it does the job for a single antenna setup. you'll want to run something like Moon Sked or similar to track the lunar window and plan ahead since you only get maybe 10 hours of moon time per day depending on your latitude.