so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and dabbled in a lot of modes but EME keeps coming up in conversations at the club and i finally sat down and read through some stuff online and now im both really excited and kind of overwhelmed. like the basic concept makes sense — bounce your signal off the moon, someone on the other side of the planet hears it — but the actual requirements to do this seem pretty intense depending on who you ask.

what i keep running into is wildly different answers about how much antenna and power you actually need to make it work. some people say you can do it on 2m with a single yagi and 100w if you use JT65 or Q65, other guys are saying you need a stack of four or more yagis and a kilowatt minimum. i get that more is always better but is there like a realistic minimum that actually produces contacts and not just frustration. my backyard isnt tiny but im not going to fit a 10-element dish back there either.

also curious how the scheduling and timing stuff works in practice. i know the moon has to be in a mutual window for both stations but do most people just hang out on the skeds pages and wait, or is there a more active calling frequency thing happening. any insight from people actually doing this would be appreciated, i dont want to spend a bunch of money and then find out i have the wrong expectations.

okay so i've been doing EME on 2m for about four years now and the single yagi + 100w thing is not a myth but you have to be realistic about it. with Q65 specifically the sensitivity is genuinely remarkable compared to JT65, like we're talking enough of a difference that stations that were borderline workable before are now solid copy. that said you're still going to need a decent yagi, something in the 12 to 14 element range minimum, and a really good low noise preamp at the feedpoint is honestly more important than squeezing another 50 watts out. coax loss kills you on EME because the path loss is something like 252 dB on 2m, every tenth of a dB at the feedline matters more than you think.

for timing and scheduling, the ON4KST chat is basically where all the action happens in real time, people post their moon windows and call for skeds right there. there's also the big contest weekends organized by ARRL and DUBUS where activity goes way up and even modest stations can make contacts because everyone is specifically looking for smaller guns. honestly the first contact feeling is pretty surreal, knowing your signal left earth, hit the moon 1.3 seconds later, and came back. worth the hassle.

the preamp placement thing the other guy mentioned is huge and i dont think enough people talk about it. i had my preamp at the shack end for an embarrasingly long time before someone set me straight and it made a noticeable difference moving it to the mast. also if youre on a budget the difference between a mediocre commercial preamp and something like a well-built homebrew unit with a good HEMT transistor is real. some guys in europe are building their own and getting noise figures under 0.3 dB which is better than most of the off-shelf stuff you'd buy anyway.

honestly the biggest thing i'd say is just dont wait until everything is perfect before trying. get on during a contest weekend with whatever you have pointed at the moon and just listen first. you'll learn more in one session than reading about it for months.