so ive been licensed about 8 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when the band opens up, but ive always been kind of obsessed with the idea of doing EME. like the concept of bouncing a signal off the moon and actually having someone hear it on the other side of the planet is just... i dont know, it scratches a brain itch that nothing else does.

anyway i finally have a bit of property to work with and im starting to think about what a realistic starter setup would look like. ive been reading about single yagi EME on 2m and it seems like people do actually make contacts that way with JT65, not a ton but it happens. my question is more about the practical side — what kind of yagi are we talking, like a 9el versus something longer, and do i need a preamp right at the feedpoint or is that more of a nice-to-have situation. also the whole moon tracking thing, do people use manual elevation/azimuth or is that just going to make me want to pull my hair out

i know this is a deep rabbit hole. i already have a IC-9700 which i think is a decent starting point. just trying to figure out if this is something i can do without building a full dish setup in my backyard

the IC-9700 is honestly a solid starting point, better than what a lot of guys had when they made their first EME contacts. single yagi 2m EME is definitely doable with JT65, people call it "big gun" versus "single yagi" operation but you can work the big stations. dont expect a ton of random contacts but the dedicated EME guys will work you.

for the antenna you really want something in the 12-15 element range if you can swing it, the difference between a 9el and say a 15el M2 or similar is significant on a mode where every tenth of a dB matters. and yeah the preamp at the feedpoint is not optional in my opinion, it IS the system basically. you want something like an SSB electronics or a Kuhne unit with a noise figure under 0.5 dB, running coax from the antenna to a preamp in the shack will just kill you on receive. the moon path loss is around 252 dB on 2m, theres no margin to waste anywhere.

for tracking — i ran manual az/el for about a year and it was tedious but workable for JT65 since you have 47 seconds per sequence. eventually i got a small rotator setup going with ham-lib and it made life a lot easier. if you're the kind of person who enjoys fiddling with software integration stuff its actually kind of fun to set up

just want to add — check out the WSJT-X documentation for EME specifically and also the ping jockey site or maybe EME Logger to see whos active. the community is pretty small but really helpful, guys will often schedule skeds with a new station just to give you a contact. dont be shy about posting that you're a new station trying to get a first contact, thats actually pretty normal in EME circles

oh and the moon doesnt have to be perfectly positioned, you get a window of several hours depending on your lat/lon and theirs so scheduling across time zones isnt as brutal as you might think