so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair amount of HF DX but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i want to try before i get too old to climb towers and mess with big antennas. my current setup is basically useless for it, i have a tribander at 40ft and thats pretty much it.

from what ive read you basically need a dish or a big yagi array on 2m or 23cm, a low noise preamp right at the feedpoint, and a decent amount of power. but the specifics are where i get confused. like how much is enough to actually make contacts these days with JT65 being a thing? i know back in the day you needed a huge array and a kilowatt but i thought digital modes changed the equation quite a bit. is a single long yagi on 2m with like 500w even remotely usable or am i just wasting my time thinking about it

also curious what the typical rx noise figure needs to be. ive seen guys talk about 0.3-0.5dB NF being important but not sure if thats for cw/ssb or if digital gives you more headroom there

yeah JT65 absolutely changed what's possible for smaller stations, no question. back in the analog days you really did need multiple yagis or a dish with serious aperture just to have a fighting chance but now single yagi contacts happen regularly on 2m. that said i wouldnt call it easy even with JT65 -- the path loss to the moon and back is brutal, something like 252dB on 2m, and the moon is only a halfway decent reflector so you cant just throw any old antenna at it.

for a realistic entry point on 2m most people suggest at least a 4 yagi array, something in the 16-17dBd range total gain, paired with a good preamp. a single long yagi like an M2 2M7 or similar might get you a handful of contacts with big gun stations on the other end but your options are going to be really limited. if you can swing a 4x array and around 500-800w at the feedpoint you'll be competitive enough to actually have fun with it. the preamp NF matters a lot more on EME than almost any other mode because your system noise floor is basically the whole game -- 0.3-0.5dB is definitely the target range, and no that's not just for CW, on JT65 your decoder is still fighting the noise floor so a crappy preamp will cost you contacts. SSB EME is a completely different animal and for that you really do need the big guns.

i made my first EME contact last spring on 2m with a single M2 2M9SSB yagi and a TE Systems amp running about 400w, so it can be done but like the other guy said your partner has to be a big station. worked W5UN which is kind of cheating because those guys have like 16 yagis but still, it counts. the EMElogger software and WSJT-X setup is pretty straightforward honestly, getting everything mechanically pointed right at the moon is where i spent most of my debugging time. i was off by more than i expected the first few tries. get a good moon tracking program and double check your antenna elevation range before you commit to anything because some fixed-mount antennas wont go high enough when the moon is near zenith depending on your latitude