so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly doing HF stuff and some weak signal VHF but ive always had this thing about EME in the back of my head. like the idea of bouncing a signal off the moon and actually making a contact just seems insane to me in the best possible way.

anyway i started reading about it and now im more confused than before. i have a 15 element yagi for 2m that i built last summer and a IC-9700 which i know can do digital modes. from what i understand JT65 or Q65 are basically the way to do this now for smaller stations? i saw some old posts about people running massive dish arrays but is any of that even necessary anymore with the digital modes or am i misunderstanding what those modes actually do for you

also the preamp situation is confusing me. i keep seeing LNA this relay that and i dont really know what kind of noise figure im actually targeting here. my yagi feedline is about 40 feet of LMR400 which i assume is not ideal but its what i have. any pointers would be appreciated, ive been going in circles reading old threads and the moonbouncers.com stuff for like two weeks now

yeah the digital modes basically changed everything for smaller stations, you're right about that. Q65 is probably what you want to look at first — it works better than JT65 for EME these days, better doppler tolerance. with a single yagi on 2m you're not going to be working the big gun stations easily but there are enough other small stations out there doing this that you can make contacts, especially if you watch the EME sked page and coordinate.

the preamp thing is legitimately important though and honestly your feedline is a real problem. 40 feet of LMR400 on 2m isn't terrible for terrestrial stuff but for EME the path loss is already enormous and every tenth of a dB you add before the LNA matters. you really want the LNA at the feedpoint or as close as physically possible, like right at the antenna port. noise figure under 0.5 dB is what people are shooting for, the DB6NT stuff is popular and so are some of the W6PQL designs if you're into building. you'll also need a sequencer so you dont blow your preamp when you key up, that's a thing people learn the hard way sometimes

start monitoring first honestly. get WSJT-X set up, aim at the moon, and see if you can decode anything. even hearing a big station is a good sign your system is in the ballpark.

the IC-9700 is actually a pretty solid starting point for this, the IF output thing people do with it for coherent EME stuff is interesting but thats way down the road. just run it stock for now.

one thing nobody mentioned yet is the antenna pointing — do you have a way to actually track the moon? like az/el rotators and some kind of tracking software. thats kind of a whole other rabbit hole but you cant really do EME if your antenna is just sitting there fixed. i use a cheap azimuth rotor and a homemade elevation setup and it works fine, nothing fancy required. there's free software like PstRotator or even just doing it manually if you're patient enough but you need something