so ive been licensed for about 8 years now and done plenty of HF DX, some satellite stuff, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my head that i keep telling myself ill get into someday. well i started doing some reading last week and now im kind of overwhelmed honestly. the math alone for the path loss is pretty humbling, like 250+ dB on 2m is just staggering when you think about it.

anyway my question is kind of broad but what does a realistic entry level EME station look like these days. i keep seeing people say you need a big yagi array and a kilowatt minimum but then i also see guys talking about working EME with a single yagi and 100w using JT65. is that actually real or are those guys only working the big guns with huge dishes. i have a decent sized yard and could probably put up a 2x or 4x yagi array eventually but i dont have the budget for a full on dish setup. also what preamp situation am i looking at, i assume i need something right at the feedpoint. running an IC-9700 right now which at least handles the digital modes fine. just trying to figure out if this is a 2 year project or a 5 year project before i sink money into it

Yeah the single yagi thing is real but you're right that it mostly means working stations with 60+ foot dishes or 4x4 yagi arrays. That said with JT65B the threshold has come way down from the old CW days, people do make legit contacts with modest setups. I started on 2m EME with a single long yagi, maybe 18 elements, 500 watts and an SSB Electronics preamp at the mast, and managed a handful of contacts in about 6 months of trying on good windows. Was it easy, no. But it worked.

The preamp thing is not optional in my opinion, you want something with like sub 0.3 dB noise figure right at the feedpoint, the coax loss will eat you alive otherwise. Cavity preamp or one of the ARR units are what most people run. Your 9700 is fine for the SDR side of things but the IF chain noise of the radio itself is kind of irrelevant once you have a good external preamp in the chain.

Honestly id say start with a single long yagi and see if you can hear the echoes first before you commit to a big array. That'll tell you a lot about your receive path and whether your location is workable. elevation rotor is kind of mandatory too which is where the cost sneaks up on you.

just wanted to add that the WSJT-X software situation is pretty mature now and JT65B specifically is what most of the EME community uses on 2m, there are skeds you can arrange through the MMMonVHF site which is basically where all the EME activity coordination happens these days. worth lurking there before you even touch any hardware so you get a sense of when the good windows are and what kind of signal reports people are exchanging. the moon has to be above the horizon for both stations at the same time which sounds obvious but actually limits your windows a lot depending on where you and the other guy are located.