so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but ive always had this thing about EME in the back of my head. like the idea of bouncing a signal off the moon is just... i dunno, it still blows my mind that people actually do this on a regular basis. anyway i talked to a guy at our club last month who does 2m EME and he made it sound almost approachable but i honestly have no idea what kind of station you need to pull this off.

my current setup is pretty modest, i've got a yaesu FT-991A and a 5 element yagi for 2m that i use for satellite work sometimes. im guessing that's not gonna cut it for moonbounce but how far off am i really. the guy at the club mentioned something about JT65 and said the digital modes changed everything for smaller stations but i dont really understand the link budget side of things. like how much antenna and how many watts are we actually talking to make a first contact realistic. any pointers would be great, ive been going down rabbit holes on the web but a lot of the info is old and i cant tell whats still relevant

yeah JT65 really did change the game for smaller EME stations, your friend was right about that. back before the weak signal modes guys needed like a full 4-yagi array and a kilowatt just to have a prayer of completing a contact. now people are doing it with what they call "minimal" stations, though minimal is relative when you're talking about moonbounce.

for 2m EME you realistically want to be thinking in terms of at least 4 long yagis, something in the 9 to 11 element range stacked, and a legal limit amplifier if you can swing it. your 5 ele yagi on a 991A is going to be very rough. the path loss on 144 MHz EME is somewhere around 252 dB which is just a staggering number when you sit and think about it. that said ive seen guys squeak through contacts with 2 yagis and 500 watts using JT65B if conditions are decent and theyre working a big gun station on the other end. wsjt-x is the software you want, its free, just download it and read through the EME section of the help file. the moon tracking is its own thing too, you'll need to look into rotator control software that knows where the moon is. HRD does it, there's also stuff like PstRotator that a lot of EME ops use. definitely get on the ON4KST chat when the moon is up, that's where everyone coordinates skeds, its pretty active

I did my first 2m EME QSO about two years ago with a pair of M2 2M9SSB yagis and a 500w amp, so it is doable without a massive array but honestly the other station was running serious hardware and that's kind of the dirty secret of small station EME, you're leaning on the big guns to pull you out of the noise. still counts though lol. the doppler shift thing caught me off guard at first, you have to let wsjt handle it but just be aware it's a thing. also point your antenna at where the moon will be not where it is, propagation delay is real when you're talking about bouncing off something 384,000 km away