so ive been licensed for about 4 years now, mostly HF stuff but ive been reading about EME for a few months and honestly its just wild to me that people are bouncing signals off the moon and actually making contacts. i finally went down a rabbit hole after talking to a guy at the club who works 2m EME with a big yagi setup and he made it sound almost doable for a regular person.

my question is basically what does a realistic entry level EME setup look like these days. i know the old school way required massive antenna arrays and high power amps and basically a whole field of yagis but ive been reading that JT65 and now Q65 have kind of changed that? like people are doing it with a single long yagi and 500 watts or something? im on 2m already and have a decent preamp situation, just wondering if anyone here has actually done a first EME contact and what your setup was when you did it. also is there a minimum elevation your moon needs to be at before its even worth trying, i feel like ive seen different numbers thrown around on that.

yeah Q65 really did change things, i wont pretend otherwise. i made my first EME contact last year on 2m with a single 9el M2 yagi, an HL-350V running about 300w, and an MGF1302 based preamp at the feedpoint. nothing fancy. the key for me was getting the preamp as close to the feed as possible and keeping that coax run short, every tenth of a dB matters when youre talking about a signal that traveled 800,000 km roundtrip.

on your elevation question, generally people say you want the moon above about 10 degrees to avoid most of the ground noise and extra path loss from the atmosphere, some guys push down to 5 degrees if they really need the window. depends a lot on your local horizon too. and you absolutely need to account for doppler shift, WSJT-X handles it automatically if you have your location and grid square entered right, dont skip that step or youll be chasing your tail.

honestly just get on 2m EME Activity Weekend, there are a lot of stations running high power big arrays and even with a modest station you can work some of them if conditions are decent. thats how i got my first one in the log.

just to add something the previous guy didnt mention — azimuth and elevation rotors are kind of non-negotiable if you want to actually track the moon properly, i tried doing it manually early on and it was a nightmare. i use a cheap az/el setup i built from surplus TV rotors and it works fine for EME purposes, the moon moves slow enough that you dont need anything super precise, maybe update every minute or two and youre good. there are free tracking programs that interface with most rotor controllers.

also check out the EME Logger software and the livecq.eu page when you operate, people post spots there and it makes it way easier to find who is on and calling. the EME community is pretty small and friendly, ive had guys specifically call me back knowing i was a small station trying to get my first contact which was cool.