so ive been licensed for about 4 years now and somewhere along the way i fell down a rabbit hole watching videos of people doing moonbounce contacts and now i cant stop thinking about it. i know its a massive undertaking equipment wise but i genuinely dont know where the starting point is supposed to be.

from what i can gather you need a big dish or yagi array, a seriously low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and high power — like were talking legal limit or close to it on most bands. i keep seeing people mention 2m EME being the most common starting point but then some guys are doing it on 70cm which seems even harder? and then theres the digital modes like JT65 which apparently changed everything because you dont need nearly as much antenna as you used to for cw eme.

my current setup is pretty modest, i have a 7 element yagi for 2m and a 100w amp which i know is laughably small for this but i just want to understand the realistic floor for making any contacts at all. is there a minimum setup that actually works with JT65B or whatever the current mode is, or am i looking at a complete rebuild of my station before i even try pointing at the moon

yeah JT65 basically democratized EME, before that you needed serious antenna farms just to hear anything. these days guys are making initials with 4 yagis and 500-600w on 2m which would have been unthinkable in the cw only days. your 7 element single yagi is going to be rough though, the path loss to the moon and back on 2m is like 252dB which is just brutal no matter how you look at it.

realistically the smallest stations making contacts on 2m EME with JT65B are running something like a 2x9el or 4x9el array and at least 400w at the feed. the preamp thing is absolutely critical — you want something like an SSB Electronics or a homebrew unit with a really good low noise transistor, NF under 0.5dB ideally, and it HAS to be at the antenna not in the shack. coax loss between the antenna and preamp kills you because that loss adds directly to your noise figure.

honestly the best thing you can do right now is get on wsjt-x and just try pointing your 7el at the moon and see if you can decode anything from the big guns. some of the serious stations run kilowatt legal limit amps and massive arrays and their signals are occasionally copyable even on small setups. itll give you a feel for the mode and then you can figure out what you need to upgrade to be a real two way station.

i did my first EME contact about two years ago on 2m with a 4x10el cross yagi array and an old henry 2k amp pushing maybe 800w at the connector. took me forever to get everything phased right and i made probably every mistake possible with the power divider but eventually it came together. the moment you see your own echo come back in wsjt its kind of surreal honestly.

one thing nobody really warned me about is how important the azimuth and elevation rotor situation is — you need something that can actually track the moon smoothly and a lot of the cheap tv rotors just arent going to cut it for elevation especially. i use a Create RC5B-3 for az and a homemade elevation setup and even that gets sketchy sometimes. also moonrise and moonset are your best windows when the moon is low and you get the ground gain effect, worth reading up on that if you havent already because it can add a few dB at the right moments which matters a lot at this level