so ive been on HF for about 6 years and VHF/UHF contesting for the last two and somewhere along the line i got the bug for EME. i blame a guy i worked on 2m during the september contest who mentioned he also does moonbounce and made it sound almost casual, which i now suspect was a lie.

anyway ive been reading everything i can find and i feel like i have a rough picture but also a lot of the stuff online is pretty old and im not sure whats still relevant. like i keep seeing references to huge yagi arrays and then other stuff saying you can do it with a single yagi now because of JT65 and WSJT. so which is it? can a single long yagi actually get you contacts or is that just theoretical best case scenario where everything goes perfectly.

my current 2m setup is a 9el yagi on an old TV rotor that i really should upgrade, running about 200w into it. i do have an masthead preamp. i know i need an az/el rotor situation to actually track the moon which is probably my biggest practical problem right now. just trying to get a realistic sense of what minimum viable EME looks like before i start spending money in directions that wont work.

the single yagi thing is real but you have to be realistic about who you can work. with JT65B on 2m and a single decent yagi, maybe 150-200w at the antenna, you can work the big stations — the guys running 4x or 8x yagi arrays with kilowatts. they have the link budget to close it even with your weak signal. what you probably wont do is work another single yagi station on the other end, the path loss just doesnt leave enough margin for that. its roughly 252 dB of free space loss on 2m EME, so yeah its not nothing.

your preamp situation matters a lot more than people think. what preamp are you running? if its not a very low noise figure unit, like sub 0.5 dB ideally, thats actually where i'd spend money first before worrying about the rotor. the az/el mount is obviously needed but a good preamp right at the feedpoint makes a real difference. for the rotor you dont need anything exotic, a lot of guys use two separate rotors one for az one for el and just deal with the slightly awkward mounting. the tracking software like PstRotator handles the moon position fine.

honestly just get on during a big EME contest weekend and listen first. you'll hear more than you expect if your preamp is decent and you'll get a feel for what the signals actually sound like coming off the moon.

i went down this rabbit hole about 18 months ago and can confirm it absorbs way more time and money than you think it will going in lol. ended up with a used Yaesu G-5500 for az/el which is fine for a single yagi, does the job. the mounting was the annoying part honestly, had to fabricate a little crossboom thing to get both rotors working together cleanly.

one thing nobody really warned me about — moonrise and moonset are your best windows when the moon is lower in elevation and the path geometry sometimes helps with troposcatter adding in, but its also when the antenna is pointing at terrain or trees for a lot of people. definitely check what your horizon looks like in all directions before you commit to a mounting location because i had to move mine twice.