so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some satellite work on SO-50 and a few others, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seems completely out of reach. talked to a guy at the club meeting last month who said he works the moon on 2m with a single yagi and i honestly didnt believe him at first. like i always assumed you needed a massive dish or a 4-yagi array minimum.

anyway im starting to do actual research now instead of just assuming. i've got a fairly clean QTH, not much in the way of obstructions to the east and west, and i could probably put up something reasonable in the backyard. running an IC-9700 so the radio side is probably okay? im assuming i need a serious LNA right at the feedpoint and im guessing low loss coax is non-negotiable. but the antenna question is where i get stuck. is single yagi on 2m actually realistic for working anyone these days or is that just kind of a bragging thing people say. and what are people using for software, i keep hearing about WSJT-X and JT65 but im not sure which mode is actually what people use for EME right now

the 9700 is actually a solid starting point, good receiver and the built in functions help. your instinct about the LNA is right, that matters more than almost anything else honestly. something like a MGF1302 based preamp right at the mast, every foot of coax before the LNA is coax you're losing signal in and you really cant afford that on EME. SSB Electronic or a homebrew unit both work, just get it as close to the antenna as you physically can.

single yagi on 2m EME is doable but you need to be realistic about it. youre not going to be calling CQ and getting a pile up. what actually happens is you work the big stations who have enough antenna gain and power to close the link on their end even if your signal is weak. with WSJT-X running JT65B mode (thats the one, forget JT65 generic, for EME its JT65B specifically) a single yagi around 7-9 elements can get you on the scoreboard. i'd say minimum 9 elements with a clean takeoff and a good preamp. the path loss is around 250 dB each way so the math is pretty brutal but the digital modes changed everything for small stations. 10-15 years ago you needed a serious array. now you can work it with a yagi and some patience.

check the ping jockey website and the moonbounce mailing list, thats where people schedule skeds and youll see who's active. first contact takes a while usually but it happens.

yeah what he said about JT65B, that's the mode. i worked my first EME contact last year on 2m with a single 9el M2 yagi and a cheap homebrew preamp i built from a kit off ebay, dont remember who made it now. took me about three weekends of trying but i got W5LDA on a sked and it was a clean decode both ways. not a huge station by any means but enough.

one thing nobody told me that made a huge difference was getting the antenna polarization right. most of the serious EME ops use H polarization but you'll see both. if youre mismatched on polarization you can lose like 20dB which is basically forget it. worth reading up on Faraday rotation too because the polarity shifts as the signal travels through the ionosphere and sometimes you just have to rotate and see what decodes.