so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and ive done a fair amount of weak signal stuff on 6m and 2m, got pretty comfortable with FT8 and done some meteor scatter contacts, but EME has always been this thing in the back of my mind that seemed just completely out of reach. lately though ive been reading more about it and im starting to think maybe its not as impossible as i always assumed, at least on 2m.

my current setup is a single 9 element yagi for 2m, which i know is nowhere near enough, and a fairly decent preamp situation with maybe 0.5dB NF at the feedpoint. i run about 200W out of a TS-790A which honestly i know isnt a lot for this kind of thing either. so my question is basically where do i draw the line between "this is hopeless" and "okay lets make this happen" - like what is the realistic minimum to work stations on JT65 EME. ive seen people claim contacts with small stations but i cant tell if thats big station on the other end doing all the heavy lifting or if both sides were modest.

also is there a scheduling site or something people still use? i remember reading about ping jockey and n0uk reflector but i dont know if those are still active. any guidance appreciated, im genuinely trying to figure out if i can pull this off without building a dish or a yagi array thats the size of a small house

the honest answer is that on 2m EME with JT65 you can make contacts with a surprisingly modest station but the key word there is modest, not tiny. realistically you want at least 4 yagis, decent coax with low loss to the array, and your power situation - 200W is workable but 500-750W would make your life a lot easier, especially trying to work other small stations. single yagi EME exists but you're basically only going to work the big guns, like the stations running kilowatts into stacked arrays or dishes. those guys can hear you fine but you'll have a hard time hearing them since path loss is symmetric on receive but not everyone is running 1kW into a 10m dish.

the NF thing matters a lot, 0.5dB is decent but you need that preamp right at the feedpoint with relay switching, which it sounds like you already know. the reflector you want now is the MOON-NET email list and the wsjt-x website has links to the EME logging database and sked systems. EME2 or maybe check ve7bqh's yagi comparison pages before you buy anything - some of those 'EME optimized' yagis on amazon are garbage. fourelements minimum, eight is much better, and proper phasing harness matters more than people think.

yeah i was in basically the exact same spot a couple years ago. ended up building a 2x8 array on a 10 foot boom cross, took me most of a summer to get the phasing harness right because i screwed up the impedance matching the first time and wondered why everything sounded dead. worked my first EME contact in about october using JT65b and it was this swedish station, couldnt believe it actually happened honestly.

the scheduling stuff has mostly moved to the chat on the wsjt-x logger and there's a discord now too weirdly enough. also the EME conference recordings from past years are on youtube and give you a really good sense of what people are actually running. dont get discouraged by guys with the big dishes, they're usually pretty happy to work small stations because it counts toward their worked all states or DXCC challenge stuff on digital