so ive been licensed for about 8 years now mostly doing HF and some VHF contesting but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that i never really pursued. recently retired and now i actually have time to dig into it properly. problem is every time i start reading about it i end up down some rabbit hole and three hours later im more confused than when i started.

what im trying to figure out is whether its even realistic to do 2m EME with a modest setup. im not talking 4x9el yagis or a dish, more like maybe a single long yagi or two yagis. i know the path loss is brutal, like 252 dB or somewhere around there at 144 MHz which is just kind of insane when you think about it. but ive been reading about people doing it with JT65B on WSJT-X and apparently the weak signal modes have changed things a lot from the old cw moonbounce days.

my main questions are what kind of antenna gain do you realistically need to work anyone, and does my preamp placement matter as much as everyone says it does. ive got a pretty quiet rf environment out in the country so noise shouldnt be a huge issue. any pointers appreciated, been reading the W5UN stuff and the EME2000 project pages but its a lot to take in

yeah the digital modes changed everything honestly. back when you had to do cw EME you basically needed a serious antenna farm just to work the big guns, but now with JT65B and Q65 even a single long yagi can get you on the board. ive seen guys work initial contacts with a single 13el M2 yagi at like 5m above ground which would have been laughable in the cw era.

preamp placement is not just important, its probably the single most important thing after antenna gain. you want that LNA as close to the feedpoint as possible, relay switching and all. every meter of coax between the antenna and your LNA is adding noise figure and it adds up fast. most people running serious 2m EME are using a relay-switched LNA literally at the mast head. MGF1302 or SSB Electronics type preamps are popular, noise figure around 0.3-0.5 dB is what you're shooting for. your receive chain is way more limiting than transmit power in a lot of cases, especially with digital modes where the big stations can hear you before you can hear them.

for antenna i wouldnt bother with a single yagi for too long, you'll work a handful of big guns and then stall out. two yagis with proper phasing and you open up a lot more. elevation rotor matters too once you start caring about window timing relative to moon elevation. your quiet rf environment is a real asset, some suburban guys are fighting S3 noise floors which is rough on EME receive.

im kind of in the same boat as you, been watching EME from the sidelines for a couple years. one thing that helped me understand the realistic expectations was just spending time on the 144.110 area on JT65B during a good moon window and watching the dx spots on the EME logger. you can see what stations are working who and get a feel for what kind of setup is actually making contacts vs just calling into the void.

also the DUBUS EME conference proceedings are worth tracking down if you havent already, some of the technical papers in there are really detailed about system noise temp calculations and how antenna gain trades off against everything else. i spent a weekend just with paper and pen going through the link budget math and it actually made the whole thing click for me in a way that reading forum posts didnt quite do