so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and always kind of written off EME as something only the big guns with huge arrays could do, but ive been reading more about it lately and apparently weak signal digital modes have changed things a lot? like people are doing it with a single yagi now which still blows my mind

my current setup is nothing special, i have a ic-9700 and ive been running satellite a bit so im already somewhat familiar with doppler correction and that whole thing. i do have a decent sized lot so putting up a bigger antenna isnt totally out of the question but i dont really know what minimum viable looks like for 2m EME these days

also the timing thing confuses me, i know you need the moon to be above the horizon for both stations but how do people actually coordinate this, is there a dedicated cluster or net or something? i see mentions of dx.qsl.net and the ping jockey site but not sure if those are still active or what the current workflow is. any pointers appreciated, been lurking this topic for a while

the ic-9700 is actually a solid starting point, better than what most of us had when we started messing with EME. the real bottleneck is gonna be your antenna gain and your preamp situation. for JT65 or Q65 on 2m you can realistically make contacts with something in the 11-13 dBd range if conditions are decent and the other station is running serious power, but youre gonna have a lot more fun and a lot less frustration with at least a pair of long yagis, something like a pair of M2 or Cushcraft 17 or 18 element beams stacked horizontally.

the preamp placement is critical, like really critical, you want a good low noise figure preamp right at the feedpoint, we're talking 0.3-0.5 dB NF if you can swing it. SSB Electronics and Kuhne both make good stuff but there are some decent homebrewed options too if youre into that. coax loss between the antenna and preamp is just killing your receive, even a few feet of LMR-400 adds up at 144 MHz.

for scheduling yeah ping jockey is still the main spot a lot of people use, and the moon net email reflector has been around forever. N0UK has a good EME logger page that shows whos active. Q65 has kind of taken over from JT65 for EME in the last couple years, better performance on the weaker paths. just get on 144.120 and listen around moonrise, youll start to get a feel for it pretty quick.

yeah what he said about the preamp, i cannot stress that enough. i made the mistake of running like 6 feet of coax before my preamp when i first set things up and it was night and day when i moved it up to the boom. completely different station basically.

also dont underestimate the pointing accuracy thing if you go with a bigger array. i had a cheap rotor setup that was maybe plus or minus 5 degrees and that was enough to cost me signal on some of the weaker paths. not a dealbreaker starting out but something to keep in mind as you scale up. the moon moves faster than you think and the beamwidth on a big antenna gets narrow enough that it actually matters