so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and i keep hearing about moonbounce at hamfests and every time someone explains it to me i nod along but honestly i still dont fully grasp what the minimum viable setup looks like. like i understand the basic concept, you bounce a signal off the moon and someone on the other side of the world hears it, but the path loss on that has to be absolutely brutal right

currently running a modest station, got a yagi up for 2m EME work someday maybe, IC-9700 in the shack which i know is capable. ive been reading about JT65 and the newer Q65 mode being basically the only realistic way to do this without a dish the size of a small house but im still fuzzy on what the antenna requirements actually look like in practice. seen people talking about single yagi EME contacts being possible but also seen people say you need at least 4 yagis to even hear anything. which is it

also how do you even schedule contacts, is there like a dedicated cluster or net for this or do people just post on dxcluster and hope

okay so the single yagi thing is real but you have to be honest with yourself about expectations. with a single long yagi on 2m, something like a 9 or 10 wavelength design, and a really good preamp right at the feedpoint, you can hear the moon in Q65 mode and you will work stations running big arrays. but those big stations have to want to work you, they have to know youre a small pistol and be willing to crank out the power on their end. the path loss is around 252 dB total on 2m which sounds impossible until you realize digital modes and modern DSP have basically changed the game entirely compared to what guys were doing in the 70s with SSB and huge dishes

the real minimum for consistent EME activity on 2m is probably two long yagis stacked, a low noise preamp with maybe 0.3 to 0.5 dB noise figure right at the antenna, and knowing how to use WSJT-X properly. the scheduling question is easy, check the ON4KST chat, thats where basically everyone coordinates EME skeds in real time. dx.qsl.net has a moonbounce database too that a lot of people use

yeah Q65 changed everything honestly. i worked my first EME contact last year with a single 9el yagi and about 100w, would not have been possible on JT65 let alone SSB. the guy on the other end was running a big array in europe and clearly doing the heavy lifting but it still counts lol. noise figure on your preamp matters way more than people think, i fried my first one by not using a decent sequencer and keying up with the preamp still in line, dont do that. sequencer is not optional if you care about your front end