so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly do HF contesting and some 2m weak signal stuff, got a pretty decent station going with a pair of 12el yagis on 2m and a decent preamp setup. anyway a buddy of mine at the club worked a few EME contacts last year and ever since then ive been kind of obsessed with the idea of doing moonbounce. i know it requires a lot more than what i have now but im not sure exactly how much more.

from what ive read you basically need a big array, like a dish or a yagi array with significant gain, a really low noise preamp, and JT65 or maybe Q65 these days for the digital modes. but the numbers people throw around are all over the place. some guys say you need at least 100w and a big dish, others say you can do it with a single long yagi if the other station has a huge array. is that actually true or are people exaggerating what a small station can do?

also whats the typical schedule for finding contacts? is there a specific time of day or month when the moon geometry is better, i know the moon has to actually be above the horizon for both stations at the same time which already seems like a logistics puzzle. any pointers appreciated, still in the research phase here

yeah the single yagi thing is real but you have to be realistic about what that means - if you have a modest setup like one long yagi and say 400 watts, you're basically dependent on the other station having a massive array, like a dish with significant aperture or a big 4-yagi array minimum. the path loss on 2m EME is around 252 dB which is just brutal, theres no way around the physics. Q65 has helped a lot though, its actually better than JT65 for this stuff and a lot of the serious EME ops have moved to it.

for timing you want to look at the moon windows using something like EME2 or just track it in WSJT-X which handles all the doppler and timing stuff automatically. the mutual window where the moon is above like 5-10 degrees for both stations is usually only a few hours at a time so you kind of plan your operating sessions around that. VHFcontests.com has a good EME calendar and the ON4KST chat is where most of the scheduling happens in real time. seriously do not skip the ON4KST chat, thats where youll actually make contacts, people post when theyre on and coordinate before calling CQ into the void.

your preamp situation matters a lot, you want something with noise figure around 0.3 to 0.5 dB, anything worse than that and youre leaving signal on the table. where is your preamp mounted right now, at the antenna or down at the shack end?

i did my first EME contact about two years ago with a single 9el M2 and 300w and it took me like three weekends of trying before i finally got one in the log. worked a big german station with a dish and honestly i couldnt beleive it actually worked when i saw my callsign come back. the doppler shift alone kind of threw me off at first because WSJT-X handles it but you still have to make sure your clock is synced tight, like within a second, or the decodes just fall apart. use GPS disciplined clock or at minimum the windows time sync pointed at a good NTP server.

one thing nobody told me was how much the ground reflection matters for a yagi setup at elevation, you want to think about your takeoff angle and what the moon elevation is going to be during your window. if youre stuck with the moon at like 3 degrees elevation and trees in the way youre just not getting out. anyway its totally doable from a modest station but you gotta be patient and pick your QSOs carefully