so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some VHF contesting, but EME has always been this kind of mythical thing i thought was way out of reach for a normal guy with a normal setup. lately ive been reading more about it and with JT65 and the digital modes it sounds like maybe its not completely insane to try even without a massive dish or a yagi farm.

my current situation is i have a tribander up for HF and a single 9el yagi on 2m that i use for local weak signal stuff, running maybe 150w out of an IC-9700. i know thats not going to cut it for EME without some serious upgrades but im trying to figure out what the minimum viable setup actually looks like. ive seen people say you need at least 4 yagis stacked and a kilowatt, others say they've done it with less. whats actually realistic here and what should i be throwing money at first — more yagis, a power amp, a better preamp, all of the above?

also completely lost on the operating side, like when do people actually get on and try this, is there a schedule or is it just whenever the moon is up and you hope someone else is listening

the preamp is honestly where i'd start before anything else. a low noise preamp at the feedpoint makes a bigger difference than you'd think — you're dealing with signals that are basically at the noise floor so every tenth of a dB matters. something with a noise figure under 0.5dB, masthead mounted, relay switched so your TX path is clean. after that yeah you want more antenna gain but even a single long yagi on 2m with a good preamp and JT65 you can occasionally work stations that have the big guns on their end. it wont be a lot of qsos but its enough to prove the concept and get you hooked.

for scheduling check out the EME2 logger and also the chat on the on4kst moon chat, thats where people coordinate. most activity clusters around perigee when the moon is closer but honestly if youre patient you can find someone to work most weekends. W5UN and a few of the big EU stations run pretty regular skeds if you reach out.

yeah what he said about the preamp is true, i was running a single 11el M2 yagi with a SSB Electronics preamp and worked a couple stations in Europe on JT65B, took forever and i had to catch them at just the right moon window but it happened. that said i was pretty miserable with the contact rate until i added a second yagi and got a Lunar Link amp. the kW really does open things up. i think the honest answer is minimum viable for regular contacts is probably 2x yagis stacked and 500w+, below that you're relying heavily on the other station having a massive array which limits who you can work. also dont sleep on polarity — horizontal vs vertical and cross-pol losses will bite you if youre not thinking about it, the moon rotates the polarization and some guys run circular pol arrays for that reason