so ive been licensed for about 12 years and done a fair bit of DX on HF but a buddy of mine at the club keeps going on about EME and honestly i always thought it was for guys with like 10 element yagis and a NASA budget but he's telling me the digital modes have changed things a lot. im mostly a 2m operator and have a pretty decent station, running about 200w into a single 9 element yagi right now which i know is basically nothing for this but curious how far off i really am.

i guess my main question is what's the realistic minimum to actually make contacts, not just hear someone occasionally but actually complete a QSO. ive read some stuff that says JT65B changed everything but that was written like 10 years ago so not sure if Q65 is the thing now or what. and is there any point even trying 2m or should i look at 23cm where i hear the path loss is actually worse so that probably answers itself.

also does antenna polarization matter as much as people say or is that one of those things that sounds important in theory but you compensate with power anyway

okay so yeah Q65 basically is the mode now for most EME work, especially on 2m. JT65B still gets used but the activity has shifted pretty heavily. your 200w and single yagi situation -- i wont sugarcoat it, youre going to have a hard time on 2m EME with that setup. the path loss on 2m EME is around 252 dB which is just brutal, and most serious stations are running 4 yagis minimum and somewhere between 500w and a kilowatt at the feedpoint. that said people have done it with less using Q65, ive seen guys claim contacts with a single long yagi and 400-500w but they're working stations with massive arrays on the other end so you're kind of depending on someone else's big gun to close the link.

polarization actually does matter and its not just theory -- you get Faraday rotation on the path so if youre fixed linear you can be completely cross-polarized at the wrong moment and lose 20+ dB, which when you've got basically nothing to spare is a big deal. circular polarization or a way to rotate your linear pol is worth thinking about if you get serious about this. what's your coax situation? feedline loss kills EME stations more than people realize.

i got into EME about two years ago and went through exactly this same rabbit hole. ended up building a 2x9 array on 2m and running 600w and honestly it took me months before i completed my first QSO, but when it happened i was genuinely kind of stunned that i was bouncing a signal off the moon and someone in Japan was hearing it. the WSJT-X software does most of the heavy lifting with Q65 but you still gotta have the hardware to back it up.

one thing nobody told me upfront was how much the moon's position matters for when you can operate, both you and the other station need the moon above the horizon at the same time obviously but also the moon has to be at a useable elevation, below like 5 degrees its basically just going through too much atmosphere. there are good windows and bad ones and planning around them is kind of part of the whole deal. check out the EME2 reflector if you havent, thats where a lot of the scheduling happens still.