so ive been on 2m for years doing mostly terrestrial stuff, some tropo when conditions are right, but ive always had EME in the back of my head as this kind of holy grail thing. talked to a guy at the club last month who actually works moonbounce and it just kind of lit a fire under me again.

my current setup is a single 9el yagi and an IC-9700 which i know is nowhere near enough for EME, at least not the old fashioned way. but im reading about JT65 and Q65 and how guys are doing it with much more modest stations than the big dish stuff from 40 years ago. so my question is basically - what is realistic for a guy with a suburban lot? i probably cant do a 4-yagi array just from a space and HOA standpoint but maybe 2? and what kind of preamp are we talking, the mast mounted stuff?

also curious about the moon tracking side of things, do most people just use software with a rotor or are there dedicated moon tracking controllers. i have an az-el rotor setup already from when i was messing with satellite so that part might not be as bad as i thought.

Q65 changed everything for EME honestly. im running 2x11el M2 yagis on 2m with an SSB Electronics preamp at the mast and ive worked over 60 initials in the last couple years. single yagi can work but youre gonna need the other station to be running serious power and a big array on their end, 2 yagis opens up a lot more contacts especially with the european stations who run big setups.

for tracking, i use PstRotator with my Yaesu G-5500 and it works fine. theres a bit of fiddling getting the moon position calibrated right but once its dialed in it tracks pretty well. main thing people underestimate is the feedline loss - even a few dB at that point in the chain really hurts you, so keep the coax run from preamp to radio as short as practical and use good hardline if you can. LMR-400 at minimum for any real length of run.

yeah the az-el rotor you already have is probably your biggest advantage there, a lot of people starting EME dont realize thats actually the annoying part to sort out. ive seen guys spend months getting an array built only to realize their rotor cant track accurately enough or the controller software doesnt talk to it right.

one thing i'd add - dont sleep on the EME2 reflector and the ON4KST chat for scheduling. EME is not like regular contesting where you just call CQ and wait, a lot of it is pre-scheduled skeds especially when youre running a more modest station. getting plugged into that community early makes a big difference because people are generally pretty willing to work smaller stations if you coordinate ahead of time. the big guns want initials too.