ok so ive been licensed for about 6 years now mostly doing HF stuff and some 2m weak signal but EME has always been in the back of my head as like the ultimate challenge. talked to a guy at a hamfest last spring who was running moonbounce on 2m with a single yagi and i didnt fully believe him until he showed me his log and yeah, JT65 contacts all over the place.

so im trying to figure out what the realistic minimum station looks like for 2m EME in. i have a FT-991A which i know is not ideal but it does 2m. my antenna situation is a single 9 element yagi at about 25 feet which is probably laughable for this mode. i have a low noise preamp somewhere in a box i bought for meteor scatter and never fully set up.

my questions are basically - how much antenna do you actually need to make contacts these days with JT65, is the 991A going to be a bottleneck on receive or is the preamp going to fix most of that, and is there like a minimum power level that makes this realistic. ive seen people say 100w is enough and ive seen people say you need a kilowatt, really not sure what to believe. any advice from people who have actually done this appreciated, not looking for the theoretical answer

so the single yagi thing is real, I did my first EME contact on a single 13 element M2 back around 2018 with 400w and it took me probably three weeks of tries before I worked anything but it does work. the key thing people dont mention enough is pointing accuracy - like your yagi needs to actually be tracking the moon properly, not just aimed in the general direction. i built a simple az/el rotor setup out of two TV rotors for the first year and it was janky but functional.

on the 991A, honestly the receiver isnt terrible but the preamp matters a LOT. you want something with a noise figure under 0.5dB ideally mounted at the antenna not at the radio, that coax run kills you on 2m receive more than people realize. the preamp in a box thing - dig it out and check the specs, if its a SSB Electronics or a Down East or similar vintage piece it might be totally fine. newer Kuhne units are excellent if you want to go that route.

power wise id say 100w is viable but frustrating. 400-500w is the sweet spot where you go from occasionally working big guns to having a real time and 1kw opens it up considerably. but dont let that stop you from trying, worked a station in Japan with 350w and a single yagi and that felt pretty unbelievable honestly

yeah what he said about the preamp placement is the big one. i made the mistake of putting mine at the shack end for like a year and wondered why my noise figure sucked. mast mounting changed everything, picked up probably 2dB on receive which doesnt sound like much but on EME that is the difference between decoding and staring at noise.

also worth mentioning the WSJT-X software side of things - make sure you're running a recent version and that your computer clock is synced tightly, like within a second, or JT65B just doesn't decode right. gps disciplined oscillator or just a good NTP setup both work. ive seen people troubleshoot for weeks thinking it was an antenna problem and it was just clock drift the whole time.