so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but lately ive been getting kind of obsessed with the idea of EME. watched a bunch of videos and read through some of the old ON4UN moonbounce stuff and honestly it sounds incredible but also like... a lot. like a LOT a lot.

im on 2m mostly, have a pretty decent station already, running about 500w into a 6el yagi which i know is basically nothing for EME. just trying to get a realistic picture of what the minimum viable setup looks like these days, especially with JT65 and WSJT-X doing a lot of the heavy lifting now. ive seen people claim you can work EME with modest arrays but i dont know what modest actually means in this context. is a single long yagi like a 15-18el M2 or similar even worth pointing at the moon or am i just wasting time without at least a 2x or 4x array

also curious about receive — i assume a decent preamp at the feedpoint is non-negotiable but what kind of noise figure are people actually running. and is there a good time of month to try first attempts or does that matter less with digital modes

okay so the honest answer is it depends on what you mean by "work EME" haha. if you mean random meteor scatter contacts then forget it, but actual moonbounce on 2m with JT65B — yeah a single yagi can do it but you need it to be a big one and your preamp situation has to be sorted properly.

i ran a single 13el tonna for a while with about 800w and worked maybe 15-20 stations over a couple years, all with big gun stations on the other end. noise figure matters enormously, like genuinely the most important thing after antenna gain. you want sub 0.5dB at the antenna, ideally closer to 0.3 or lower. a good MGF1302 or ATF54143 based preamp right at the feedpoint makes a huge difference vs having it in the shack. coax losses at 2m are just brutal and every tenth of a dB counts.

perigee is worth paying attention to — moon is closer so path loss drops a bit, maybe 2dB improvement which is meaningful when you're already marginal. and the activity windows around the major contest weekends like the ARRL EME contest in fall are when youll find the most stations. honestly just get on JT65 during a contest weekend and see what you can decode, thats the real test of your RX setup before you worry about transmitting

i got my first EME contact last spring with a 4x9el array and 1kw, took me forever to actually get it working right but it happened. the preamp thing is 100% true what the other guy said, i had mine in the shack initially and it was a mess. moved it to the mast and suddenly I could actually decode stuff. dont underestimate how much the azimuth and elevation accuracy matters too — i spent a weekend just getting my rotor calibration right because i was consistently off by a few degrees and that was killing me on narrow beamwidth