so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX stuff but the last year or so ive been obsessed with the idea of doing EME on 2m. i know its not exactly a casual weekend project but i feel like ive hit a ceiling with regular VHF work and this seems like the next logical thing to obsess over.

my current setup is pretty modest for this kind of thing — i have a single 11el yagi up at about 30 feet, an IC-9700, and a decent SSB LNA preamp right at the feedpoint. from what ive been reading i probably need significantly more antenna gain to make any real contacts, and the stuff about system noise figure is starting to make my head spin a little.

the question i keep running into is whether i should try to build a 4-yagi array or just go bigger with a single long yagi first. ive seen guys running like 4x17el M2 antennas and doing reasonably well but i also know some stations are running massive arrays and even then its not guaranteed. is weak signal digital like JT65 basically required at this point or do people still make CW contacts with modest stations? my lot isnt huge so im trying to figure out what the realistic ceiling is before i dump a bunch of money into this.

JT65 changed everything for EME, honestly. before that you basically needed a big array and a ton of power just to have a shot at it, now people are making contacts with setups that would have been considered laughable back in the analog days. that said your single yagi is still probably going to be a real limiting factor even with digital modes — not impossible but youre going to be working the biggest stations only and your schedule fill rate will be frustrating.

the 4-yagi array thing is pretty much the sweet spot for a serious but manageable home station in my opinion. four 17el or similar antennas with a proper power combiner and a good H-frame mount, get your coax losses down as low as you can, and run whatever power your radio and amp can put out legally. noise figure matters a lot on EME, like a 0.5dB improvement in your system NF actually makes a noticeable difference in what you can decode, so dont cheap out on the preamp or the coax between it and the antenna. sequencer too, you absolutely need a sequencer or youll blow the preamp eventually during transmit.

CW is still happening but its mostly the big guns running kilowatt-class amps and large arrays talking to each other. if you want to actually build up a respectable EME initial count without losing your mind, JT65 on 144 is where the activity is.

I went through almost exactly this same thought process a couple years ago. ended up going with a 4x9el setup first just to see if I could even decode anything, and honestly it worked better than I expected with JT65 — made maybe 30 or 40 initials before I upgraded to a bigger array. the moon window and tracking software is kind of a whole other rabbit hole too, if you havent looked into that yet. WSJT-X handles most of it but you need something feeding it accurate az/el data if your antenna needs to track.