* Background *

I have long wanted to start doing moonbounce, known as Earth-Moon-Earth (EME), as I felt it represented one of the most challenging parts of the hobby. It's almost at the extreme sports end of it in fact, everything has to be bigger, better, and well engineered, compared to other parts of the hobby. Having worked DX on most bands from 10m up to 3cms in my time, I needed a new challenge.

I first operated on EME in 1992 on 2m from the shack of Dave G0LBK. It was done using CW, very narrow receive filters, very high powers and whopping great Yagis. I worked three stations, two being in the USA and one in Germany. Although very impressive, it was not the direction that I wanted to go. The advent of weak signal digital modes for EME in the early 2000s piqued my interest and made the barrier to entry much lower than before. I contemplated a 23cms EME system using a few hundred Watts and a 3m dish. To this end I bought a suitable dish feed from OK1DFC but then real life got in the way, and the feed stayed in its box for the next twenty years!