so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when conditions are good but ive always been fascinated by EME. watched a few videos and read some stuff but the equipment requirements seem kind of all over the place depending on who you ask.

my current setup is a yaesu ft-991a and i have a 5 element yagi for 2m that i built last summer. i know thats almost certainly not gonna cut it for moonbounce but i dont really know what the minimum viable setup looks like. i see people talking about running 4 yagi arrays and kilowatt amplifiers and then other guys claiming they worked the moon on like a single long yagi with 100w which honestly sounds made up to me.

also the software side confuses me a bit, i know WSJT-X is involved but i see references to JT65A specifically for EME vs other modes and im not sure what the current consensus is on that. any pointers would be appreciated, dont need to be hand-held just point me in a direction

the single yagi 100w thing isnt made up, its just really hard and you need to be on the other end of a very large station to pull it off. most of the serious EME guys running big arrays will sometimes specifically call CQ to work small pistols as a challenge, so it does happen. but dont build your expectations around that being your everyday experience.

realistically for 2m EME you want to be thinking at least a pair of long yagis, something like 2x17 element or similar stacked, and as much power as you can legally run into a decent preamp. the preamp is honestly as important as the power, your receive side matters enormously because the path loss is roughly 252dB on 2m and youre fighting that on both ends. a good low noise figure preamp at the feedpoint, like 0.3-0.5dB NF, makes a real difference. i use a DEM unit but there are several good options.

on software yeah JT65A is still the go-to for EME specifically even though a lot of 2m operators have moved to FT8 for terrestrial stuff. the EME community has mostly stuck with JT65A, theres an EME2 protocol too but JT65A is what youll see the most activity on. grab WSJT-X and look at the EME section on the WSJT website, theres a lot of good documentation there and the logging side will make more sense once you see how the sequencing works.

what he said about the preamp is no joke. i upgraded mine and it was like night and day, more than going from 500w to 1kw honestly. also worth joining the Moon-Net mailing list if you havent, its old school email list stuff but thats where a lot of the serious EME operators still coordinate skeds and talk equipment. you can find some pretty deep technical threads in the archives going back years.

one thing nobody told me when i was starting out was to pay attention to where the moon actually is in the sky relative to your antenna. sounds obvious but i spent like two sessions wondering why i wasnt decoding anything before i realized my elevation rotor was reading about 8 degrees off and the moon was partially behind my garage roof half the time. az/el tracking matters more than people think when youre dealing with margins that tight