so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but lately ive been completely obsessed with the idea of doing moonbounce. like the concept that you can bounce a signal off the moon and have someone on the other side of the planet hear it is just... i dont know, it breaks my brain in a good way.

anyway i started reading about it and now im more confused than when i started. i get the basic idea that you need a big antenna and a lot of power and low noise receive setup, but the specifics are where im getting lost. ive seen people doing EME on 2m with a single yagi which i would not have thought possible, and then ive seen these insane 4x8 array setups that look like something out of a military installation. whats actually the minimum realistic setup to make a contact these days, especially with JT65 being so common now. i have an IC-9700 so the radio side might be okay? not sure if the transverter route is even necessary at my power level. my shack space is limited so a 4 yagi array is probably not gonna happen but maybe 2? running about 400w to the antenna currently on 2m for normal terrestrial stuff.

also curious how the scheduling works, do people just hang out on the calling frequency and hope or is there a cluster/skimmer type system for EME these days

the IC-9700 is actually a solid starting point, better than what a lot of us had when we started doing this. the rx noise figure isnt spectacular but its workable especially if you stick a decent preamp right at the feedpoint. i run a SSB Electronics preamp on my 2m setup and that made a bigger difference than anything else i did honestly.

realistically for 2m EME with JT65 you want at least a 2x yagi setup with good stacking, something in the 12-15 dBd range total gain, and getting your coax loss down as low as you can stand. some guys do it with a single long yagi like a 12 or 15 element M2 or similar but your window to work stations is going to be pretty narrow and you'll need the moon at a decent elevation. two yagis stacked properly buys you a lot more flexibility. the 400w should be fine to start getting contacts, plenty of stations on the EME skeds site and also the DX cluster does pick up EME spots these days through the usual channels. K1JT's software plus the sked pages on the various EME reflectors is really how people coordinate, its not totally random

yeah what he said about the preamp is no joke. i wasted like a whole season wondering why my decode rates were so bad and it turned out my feedline was adding maybe 1.5dB of noise before the signal even got anywhere useful. moved the preamp to the mast and it was like a completely different radio. also worth looking at the EME2 reflector if you havent already, theres a lot of experience on there and people are generally pretty helpful with new folks trying to get into it. some of the old timers still do CW EME which i find kind of insane but respect