so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly doing HF, some 2m weak signal stuff, and for the last year or so ive been obsessed with the idea of doing EME. like the concept of bouncing a signal off the moon is just wild to me and i want to actually do it before i get too old and lazy to build the array lol

main thing i keep getting stuck on is the antenna situation. i see guys running 4x4 yagi arrays on 2m and that seems like a massive undertaking physically. i have a decent sized backyard but im in a suburb so HOA stuff is a real concern. is there any realistic way to do EME on 2m with like a single yagi or a 2-yagi setup, or am i just dreaming? ive heard about the JT65 modes making it way more accessible than the old days but i still dont know what realistic expectations should be for a modest station

also what kind of preamp are we talking at the feedpoint, and does the power amp situation get complicated? i have an IC-9700 so at least i think the radio side is covered. would love to hear from anyone actually running EME even if your setup is on the smaller side

yeah EME on a budget antenna setup is actually way more doable now than it was even 10 years ago. i ran single yagi EME on 2m for about 8 months before i finally built my 4-yagi H-frame and the difference is night and day but single yagi is a real thing, you just gotta manage expectations. with JT65B or Q65 you can make legit QSOs, especially when you're working stations that have big arrays on the other end.

the preamp is probably the single most critical piece of the whole system honestly. you want something with a noise figure under 0.5dB and it needs to be right at the feedpoint, like physically at the relay box on the boom, not in the shack. the coax loss between the antenna and the preamp kills you more than almost anything else. i use a cavity preamp that someone local built for me with a PHEMT transistor and it measures around 0.3dB NF which is pretty much as good as it gets for 2m.

power wise most guys are running 500-1500 watts at the antenna. if you have the 9700 you'd need an external amp, something like a TE Systems brick or if you want to go used the old Mirage and Lunar-Link amps show up on QRZ classifieds sometimes. the 9700 drives them fine usually. main thing is you want that power actually getting to the antenna not disappearing in a long run of coax, so factor in line loss seriously when youre planning

this is something i went down the rabbit hole on last winter. couple things i'll add -- the moonrise and moonset windows are when you want to be on if you're running modest power and antenna, the path loss is slightly lower and depending on your location the moon being closer to the horizon can help with local noise too. or hurt it, depends on your surroundings really

also look at the N0UK EME logger and the WSJT-X built in tracking stuff, getting your antenna pointed accurately matters more than most people expect especially with a smaller antenna where your beamwidth is wider so you think it wont matter but trust me, get the tracking right. i spent two sessions wondering why i wasnt hearing anything and turns out my azimuth offset was about 4 degrees off in my rotator calibration, felt like an idiot