so ive been licensed about 6 years now and done a fair bit of VHF weak signal stuff, some tropo scatter, even a few meteor scatter QSOs on 2m and 6m. but EME has always been this sort of intimidating thing in the background that i kept telling myself id get into someday. well someday is apparently now.

the math is what gets me. like i understand the path loss is somewhere around 250-260 dB on 2m depending on the moon's distance, and i know JT65 and Q65 have basically made this accessible for stations that wouldnt have had a prayer 20 years ago, but im still trying to wrap my head around what a realistic minimum station looks like. ive got a TS-890 which i know is capable, decent PC for digital, and im thinking about a 4x9el yagi setup to start. is that going to get me anything or am i going to just be listening to everyone else work each other while i transmit into the void.

also the tracking thing. i dont have a rotator that can handle elevation right now, just an azimuth setup. i know you can do some window operation when the moon is at low elevation but how practical is that really for actually making contacts. dont want to spend a bunch of money on an elevation rotator if im going to regret the antenna decision first.

4x9el is honestly a reasonable starting point these days with Q65. it's not a big gun setup but people are making EME contacts on less, especially if your noise floor is decent and you're patient about who you call. the key thing people underestimate is the preamp placement - you want that LNA right at the feedpoint, every tenth of a dB matters when you're down in the noise like this. something like an SSB Electronics or a DB6NT unit mounted at the mast, not in the shack.

on the elevation thing, yeah it limits you. the window where the moon is low enough to work without elevation and still have meaningful path to other stations is real but it's not huge. maybe a couple hours each day the moon is up depending on your latitude and where the other stations are. you can make contacts that way for sure, ive seen guys do it, but youre leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. my honest advice is sort out the elevation before committing to the yagi array. a second-hand G-5500 or similar runs maybe 200-300 bucks used and the software integration with WXtrack or similar is pretty painless.

the TS-890 is fine. some people get fussy about IF bandwidth and such for EME but in practice with JT65 or Q65 the radio choice matters a lot less than antenna gain and noise figure. you're not going in blind here, you've got a solid base to build from.

dont overthink the rotator thing too much, i ran az-only for almost a year before I added elevation and honestly made a bunch of contacts. you have to be more strategic about when you operate and you're basically limited to the times when the moon is between like 5 and 20 degrees or so, but it's doable. the logging and scheduling software makes it a lot easier to plan those windows in advance.

one thing i wish someone told me earlier - the EME2 or maybe the Moon-net reflector mailing list is where a lot of the coordination still happens, at least for schedules with smaller stations. worth subscribing just to lurk and get a feel for how people set up skeds. some of the big guns are always on during contests and will call CQ into the noise hoping someone hears them, that's actually how i got my first couple contacts before i even had my elevation rotor sorted out.