so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly HF stuff, some VHF contesting, and a buddy at the club mentioned EME like half a year ago and it just kind of stuck in my head. ive been reading about it on and off and i think i understand the basic concept - you bounce your signal off the moon and someone on the other side of the world hears it - but when it comes to actually doing it i feel pretty lost on what the minimum viable setup even looks like.

i know the big guns are running like 4x yagi arrays with a kilowatt and massive preamps right at the feedpoint, but ive also been reading about how JT65 basically changed the game and people are doing EME with way less now. i have a 20 element yagi i use for 2m meteor scatter and a TS-590 that i could use with a transverter, maybe 100 watts to the antenna. is that anywhere close to enough or am i just dreaming here. and what kind of window do you actually have to work with when the moon is up and in a good position, i feel like ive seen people mention something about libration and i dont fully understand what that does to the signal.

also just curious if anyone here has actually made legit EME contacts and what the experience was like. does it feel like a real QSO or is it more like... you decode a few lines of text and call it a day

you're actually not that far off from being able to do it on 2m, especially with JT65B. a single long yagi and 100w has been done but you're gonna be working mostly the stations with big arrays on the other end, you probably wont hear much back from similarly small stations. the real killer is your noise figure - whatever preamp youve got needs to be right at the antenna, like physically at the feedpoint, because every tenth of a dB of feedline loss before your LNA kills you. MGF1302 or a good SSB Electronics unit at the mast is sort of the baseline people talk about. your 20el yagi is decent but honestly a longer boom or stacking two of them would open things up a lot more.

libration fading is just the moon wobbling slightly in its orbit and rotation, it smears the signal and causes that fluttery warbling sound you hear on EME recordings, JT65 handles it better than SSB obviously but it still affects your decode rate on weak signals. your window is maybe 4-6 hours when the moon is high enough, and the best times are when you and the DX station both have moon above the horizon at the same time which isnt always as long as you'd think depending on where they are.

as for whether it feels like a real QSO - honestly yeah it does once you get one, theres something weird about knowing that signal went 480,000 miles round trip to get to you. the first time i decoded a callsign off the moon i just sat there for a second. its not the same rush as a pile-up but its its own thing.

just chiming in because i went through exactly this about two years ago. ended up with a pair of M2 2MXP28 yagis stacked vertically and a solid state amp pushing about 600w, worked somewhere around 40 DXCC on 2m EME which i never thought id do. the stacking helped way more than i expected, the gain jump from one yagi to two is real and the pattern gets cleaner too.

one thing nobody told me that i had to figure out the hard way - your coax relay switching has to be fast and reliable, TR sequencing is actually kind of critical on EME because youre running high power and the timing between your PA, preamp, and antenna relay matters more than you'd think. fried a preamp early on because my sequencer wasnt set up right. just something to plan for when you're putting it all together.