Tools of the trade

Scanning: Tools of the trade.


The contents of my helios scanning ships is above. A mix of nearly all the ship and exploration probes that one can have. I have an eye on the Sisters of EVE scan probe launchers and exploration probes as well as the implants but this is a long term goal for me now: running the lower-level agents for SOE can only get you so far. I have an invite from a higher level agent but she's in an area of very dangerous null-sec, claimed by the Scalar Federation; so I need to avoid it.

Me, Max, Hal and TFAce went on a low-sec jaunt and tried out scanning. I was keen to pass on my experience and skills to the others; since being able to travel unseen in a covert-ops as well as using the scan probes proficiently is in everyone's interests.

I easily found Hal's drake with a snoop probe, 32 seconds after I dropped it. Had more trouble with TFAce's zealot but I found it after a second attempt. Finding decent exploration sites is harder and there is a lot to find, if one has the patience and the money to burn through the probes. We managed to find a drone gravimetric site, a gistii radar site and Max managed to get six cosmic anomalies with a large concentration of Battleships in one of them. TFAce went after these ships with gusto and the salvage was excellent. Am trying to find more mission sites and hidden sites for salvage purposes as there's money to be made there am sure. Need to find some hidden belts as well, I chanced upon one by accident a while back but can't remember where it was!

Anyway, I used two types of scan probe launchers: a recon probe launcher and a scan probe launcher. Despite it's name, the recon probe launcher can be fitted onto any ship type providing it has the cpu / powergrid requirements. The difference between the two are:

Recon Probe Launcher

• Can only use the ship probes (Ferret, Fathom, Spook and Snoop)
• Ship probes are designed to find ships
• They return results quicker than exploration probes
• They have weaker sensor strength than exploration probes
• They are effective over a wide range (0au to 40au)
• System-wide scanning bookmarks are not essential

Exploration Probe Launcher

• Can only use the exploration probes (sift, comb, pursuit types with the four signature variations 'magneto','radar','ladar', 'gravimetric', and 'unknown'
• Exploration probes can find everything
• They return results a lot slower than ship probes
• They have very high sensor strength
• They are only effective under 4AU in range
• System-wide scanning bookmarks are essential - initial placement of the probe is crucial

I often found that I was able to go from a Quest straight to a Sift, and when I couldn't a comb will usually work - pursuit probes proved to be a bit useless, at least right now.

Using multiple exploration probes is good too and it's probably best to seed a handful of probes first (up to three) and then do a scan on all of them at once rather than one by one. I selected them via shift+click.


The F10 map is very useful and one can hover the mouse over any of the results / probes to get a break down of the results. Here I am dropping RADAR probes to find a rather elusive RADAR site. So far, I did not get a hit but earlier scans have told me that there is a RADAR site here and I am going to spend some time on it. It's a challenge now and you never know, it could result in a something nice. Fingers crossed.