so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and EME has always been kind of the holy grail thing in the back of my mind, you know the mode that seems completely insane until you start reading about it and then it seems slightly less insane but still pretty wild. anyway i finally have a yard situation where i could maybe put up a serious antenna and my neighbor who runs 2m EME told me i should just go for it but i dont really know where to start in terms of minimum viable setup.

im on 2m right now with a pretty decent station, running about 400w into a 9el yagi which i know is nowhere near enough. ive been reading that you need somewhere around 1kw and a big array to even have a shot at making contacts but then ive also seen stuff about JT65 making it more accessible than it used to be. is there a realistic entry point here or is this genuinely a mode that requires a massive investment before you hear anything at all? and if someone has done this recently id love to know what your first contact experience was like

yeah EME is definitely one of those things where the barrier to entry got dramatically lower once digital modes took over, specifically JT65B on 2m. back in the CW only days you needed a serious array just to hear yourself, but now people are making legit EME contacts with a single long yagi and 400-500w if conditions are right and you're working a big gun station on the other end.

realistically though if you want to work more than just the absolute biggest stations you're looking at at minimum a 4 yagi array, something like four 9 or 12 element yagis with decent preamp — a good low noise preamp is honestly more important than people think, you want something like 0.5dB NF or better right at the feedpoint. the path loss on 2m EME is around 252dB depending on moon distance so every fraction of a dB in your system noise figure actually matters. and for power youre right that 1kw is kind of the practical minimum to be competitive, though ive heard of guys with 500w doing it on JT65 with big antennas.

first contact is wild by the way, knowing that your signal went to the moon and back and someone 8000 miles away decoded it is a genuinely weird feeling

the JT65 thing is real, i worked my first EME contact last year with a single 15el M2 and an old Kenwood running 400w and a cheap cavity preamp. it took me like three sessions before i actually completed a QSO but i did get it done. the guy on the other end was running something like 4kw and a big array in europe so there was definitely a big gun / pistol asymmetry going on there lol but it counts.

one thing nobody told me was how much azimuth and elevation tracking matters, you can lose a lot of signal if your antenna isnt actually pointed well at the moon, seems obvious but i was surprised how quickly things degraded when i was a few degrees off. also if you havent already get wsjt-x set up and just start listening during peak EME activity windows, you can actually hear the bigger stations bouncing off the moon before you even transmit anything and that really makes it feel real