so ive been licensed for about 8 years and done a decent amount of HF DX but EME has always been this kind of mythical thing in the back of my head that i figured was only for guys with huge arrays and a dedicated building for equipment. recently talked to a guy at a hamfest who said he worked a handful of stations on 2m EME with a single yagi and 200 watts which kind of blew my mind a little.

now im actually trying to figure out what a realistic entry point looks like. i have a IC-9700 already so the radio side is mostly handled i think, and i could put up maybe a 9 or 11 element yagi on a decent az/el mount without the neighbors losing their minds. is that even enough to work anyone or am i just going to be listening to noise for months. also the low noise preamp situation confuses me — everyone says its critical but i dont know if we're talking like 0.3dB NF or if anything under 1dB is fine. and do i need a sequencer for a modest setup like this or is that more important when you're running higher power.

mostly want to do digital, JT65 i assume, not expecting to ragchew on moonbounce obviously but even making a handful of contacts would be incredible to me. any pointers appreciated, even if the answer is 'you need more antenna than that'

the single yagi thing is real, people do work EME on 2m with a single long yagi but you have to be realistic about who you can work. you're mostly going to be working the big stations — the guys with 4x or 8x yagi arrays or dish setups. they can hear you even when you can barely hear them, thats kind of the nature of it with asymmetric setups. with an 11el and 200w on JT65 you will make contacts, it just might take some patience and picking the right windows when the moon is in a good position for both of you.

on the preamp question — yeah it matters a lot more on EME than basically any other mode because you're dealing with signals that are already right at the noise floor. something in the 0.3 to 0.5 dB NF range is what people are chasing, the SSB Electronic or Kuhne preamps are popular and they mount at the feedpoint which is where you want it. every tenth of a dB genuinely counts up there. and yes get a sequencer even for modest power, protecting the preamp from your own TX is not something you want to learn the hard way.

im in almost exactly the same boat as you, been researching this for like 6 months. one thing i kept seeing that nobody mentioned to me at first is the az/el mount is really where a lot of the money goes if you want to do it properly. a lot of guys underestimate how precise the tracking needs to be especially as the moon moves and you're trying to hold a marginal signal. also the EME2 or WSJT-X setup for JT65 on 2m is pretty well documented at this point, the learning curve on the software side is manageable. i havent made my first contact yet but im getting close i think, just finishing up the mount wiring.