so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly done HF stuff, some VHF contesting here and there, but EME has always been this kind of mythical thing in the back of my head. lately ive been reading more about it and watching some videos of guys making JT65B contacts via the moon and it just looks insane to me that this is even possible.

my main question i guess is what does a realistic starter setup actually look like for 2m EME. ive seen guys with these absolutely massive yagi arrays and dish setups that look like they belong to a government agency, but ive also heard you can do it with more modest gear now that WSJT-X is so refined. is a single yagi even remotely viable or do i need at minimum a pair? my current 2m antenna is just a 9el yagi up about 30 feet which i know is not gonna cut it but trying to understand the gap between where i am and where i need to be.

also what are typical power levels people run, i have an amp that does 500w on 2m which i always assumed would be enough for most things but EME is a different animal obviously. appreciate any input from guys who have actually done this, not just read about it

yeah single yagi EME on 2m is doable now with JT65B and especially Q65 which has gotten pretty popular lately, the digital modes have completely changed what the minimum viable station looks like. that said a 9el at 30 feet isnt gonna get you there, you really want something in the 12 to 16 element range at minimum and height matters a lot because youre fighting ground reflection and noise. most guys doing single yagi EME are running something like a 4x or 2x array of longer yagis, not one antenna.

500w is actually not bad for a starting point, a lot of guys run 1kw or more but ive seen single yagi contacts made with 400-500w when the geometry is right and the other station has a big array. the path loss on EME is around 252 dB at 2m which is just a brutal number, every dB of antenna gain you can squeeze out matters enormously. your biggest wins early on are going to be antenna gain and a really low noise preamp at the feedpoint, like a good LNA with maybe 0.3-0.5 dB noise figure makes a real difference at these signal levels.

get on the ON4KST chat and just lurk for a while, thats where most of the EME scheduling and real time coordination happens. youll get a feel for who is active and what stations are workable for a modest setup. its a genuinely great community, guys with big stations love helping smaller pistol stations make their first contacts.

made my first EME QSO about two years ago on 2m with a pair of 17el yagis and 800w, took me forever to get the sequencer and preamp switching sorted out but once it all clicked it was one of those moments where you just sit there kind of stunned. the signal levels are so far below the noise that watching a decode come up feels almost unreal.

one thing nobody really warned me about is how much the az/el rotor setup matters, like tracking the moon accurately enough to stay on beam is more involved than i expected. i was using a cheap az rotor and a manual el setup at first and it was a mess, upgraded to a proper el rotor with feedback and it made a huge difference. also the moon noise — when you first swing your antenna onto the moon and see the noise floor rise slightly in your SDR thats a pretty good indicator your system is working, its called Y factor measurement and its a great sanity check before you start calling.