so ive been licensed for about 12 years now mostly doing HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when conditions are good, but ive always wanted to try moonbounce and i think im finally at a point where i can maybe make it happen. the problem is every time i start reading about it i go down a rabbit hole and come out more confused than when i started.

right now i have a single 9el yagi for 2m which i know is nowhere near enough, and im running about 150w out of a TS-790. from what i gather you basically need either a big dish or a yagi array to have any chance, and the preamp situation is critical. ive seen setups with 4x9el up to 4x17el or even bigger and people talking about system noise temps like 50K or below which is just... i dont fully understand how to even calculate whether my station is viable or not.

also the software side confuses me. i know JT65 is what most people use for EME now, or is it still JT65B specifically? and do you need to know the moon position ahead of time to schedule contacts or can you just monitor and call? genuinely not sure how realistic this is from a suburban lot in the midwest. any experience from people who have actually done it would be appreciated

okay so first thing, dont get discouraged by the big gun stations you see on the EME pages because yeah some of those guys have 20 meter dishes and kilowatt amps and that's a whole different world. but EME with modest stations is absolutely doable now in a way it wasnt 15-20 years ago, basically entirely because of JT65. and yeah its JT65A for 2m EME these days, not JT65B -- B is for lower frequencies i think, but honestly WSJT-X will sort that out for you automatically if you pick the right mode.

your 9el and 150w is going to be tough as a standalone setup, not gonna lie. the path loss on 2m EME is something like 251 dB which is just a brutal number. most people doing it with modest antennas are running at least 4 yagis and somewhere between 400-1000w, and the preamp is honestly more important than people think -- you want something with maybe 0.3 dB NF or better, the SSB Electronics and DB6NT preamps are what most people run, mount it right at the feedpoint not in the shack. if your noise figure is bad you can throw watts at it all day and it wont matter.

the scheduling thing -- there are EME chat clusters online, the big one is the ping jockey server or the EME Logger, people coordinate skeds there, and yeah you basically need to know when the moon is above the horizon for both stations simultaneously which is why the sked coordination matters. moonrise/moonset times are in WSJT-X. its more doable than it sounds once you get into it

i did my first EME contact about two years ago on a whim during an ARRL contest weekend, had four 11el M2 yagis on an H-frame and 600w into a cavity amp. honestly worked about 6 stations that weekend which blew my mind. the moment you see your own call come back in the waterfall after bouncing off the moon its kind of surreal.

one thing nobody told me before i started was how much the moon's position affects signal levels beyond just being above the horizon -- perigee vs apogee makes a real difference, like several dB worth, and there are days where the moon is at a weird declination and your antenna elevation range becomes a limiting factor depending on how you have things mounted. i have an azimuth-elevation rotor setup which is basically mandatory, trying to track the moon manually is not realistic for a 20-30 minute contact window.

suburban lot in the midwest is workable as long as you dont have too much RF coming in from neighbors and your horizon isnt completely blocked. EME signals are so weak that local noise floor really does bite you. good luck with it, its one of the cooler things you can do with a VHF setup