so ive been licensed about 6 years now, mostly HF stuff and some 2m weak signal but ive always been kind of fascinated by moonbounce. watched a youtube video of someone working JT65B EME contacts and went down a rabbit hole for like 3 hours last night. now im wondering if this is actually something i could do or if im totally in over my head.

i know the path loss is absolutely brutal, something like 250-252 dB round trip on 2m which is just insane when you think about it. and i know you basically need serious antenna gain and low noise figures to make it work. my current setup is a single 9 element yagi for 2m which i know isnt going to cut it, not even close. ive seen people run 4x yagi arrays and some guys running big dishes on 23cm.

my question is really around what the minimum viable setup looks like these days with JT65 and the digital modes doing so much of the heavy lifting. like what power level and antenna gain are people actually pulling off contacts with, and is 23cm easier to get into than 2m for a first timer? or does that make it harder because of dish requirements. just trying to get a realistic picture before i go down an expensive rabbit hole i cant get out of

2m is probably still the better starting point honestly. the community is huge compared to 23cm EME and youll find activity way more easily especially on the big EME contest weekends. minimum workable setup on 2m with JT65B is generally considered to be something like 4x long yagis, maybe 16-17 dBd of gain, and at least 500w into the array. some guys claim to work stations with less but theyre usually on the other end with a kilowatt and a big array so it doesnt really help you.

the preamp is honestly where a lot of people underestimate the importance. you want a good low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, we're talking 0.3 to 0.5 dB NF or thereabouts, because the sky noise on 2m is low and your system noise figure really matters. coax loss before the LNA just kills you. sequencing is critical too, get that sorted before you ever key up or you'll toast the preamp.

23cm is a different beast entirely, the dishes get physically smaller which sounds easier but feed design and surface accuracy become a headache. i started on 2m EME about 4 years ago with a 4x13 element array and an old Mirage amp putting out around 600w and made my first contact about 3 weeks in. it's addictive, fair warning

yeah what he said about the preamp placement is dead on, i learned that the hard way. also worth knowing that the moonbounce reflections are pretty doppler shifted depending on where the moon is in its orbit so youll need to account for that in WSJT-X, but honestly the software handles most of it once you dial in your settings. the hardest part for me was getting the antenna elevation sorted because if you cant track the moon properly none of the gain matters. even a simple SPID or similar rotor setup helps a lot but ive seen guys do it with manual az/el and a moon tracking app which is kind of impressive and kind of painful at the same time