so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF stuff, some 2m meteor scatter, and recently got into JT65 which honestly kind of reignited my interest in weak signal work. a buddy at the club meeting last month was talking about EME and i sort of went down a rabbit hole reading about it and now i cant stop thinking about trying it.

the thing is i have no idea what a realistic entry level setup looks like for 2m EME. ive seen people talking about needing massive yagi arrays and high power amps but then other people seem to say you can do it with a single long yagi and like 500 watts if you use JT65. is that actually realistic or is that wishful thinking? i have a IC-9700 already so the radio side might be okay but i genuinely dont know what preamp situation i need, what kind of yagi length makes sense, and whether my feedline is going to kill everything before it even gets to the radio. any pointers from people who have actually done contacts would be really appreciated, not looking for a full station buildout just trying to understand what the minimum viable setup actually looks like.

honest answer: single yagi EME on 2m is doable but you have to have realistic expectations about who you can work. most of your contacts are gonna be with big gun stations running 4x or 8x yagi arrays and kilowatts, but that's fine because they can hear you even if you cant hear them as well. the key things that matter more than people realize are the preamp placement and feedline loss. you want a mast mounted preamp - something like an SSB Electronics or a Kuhne unit - right at the antenna, not down in the shack. even half a dB of extra noise figure eats into your link budget and on EME that actually matters.

for the yagi itself you're probably looking at something in the 12 to 15 element range minimum, a good M2 or Innovantennas long yagi would work. your 9700 is fine for the radio, the IF DSP in it is decent. feedline wise try to keep it short and use quality hardline if you can, LMR-400 at minimum. and yeah JT65 is what makes single yagi EME possible in the modern era, before that you basically needed a big array. you'll want to track carefully too, a reasonable az/el rotor setup with something like PstRotator driving it makes life a lot easier.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been researching this for a few months. one thing i found really useful was the moonbouncers mailing list and also the ON4KST chat - thats where a lot of the EME scheduling happens in real time. from what i can tell a lot of first contacts for small stations happen around perigee when the moon is closest because the path loss drops a bit. also apparently polarity rotation is a thing that can really mess with you if your antenna cant adjust for it, some people have fixed yagis and just accept the loss but others use a rotating feed or circular polarization. i havent made my first contact yet so take this with a grain of salt but thats what ive been reading up on.