Missions & Complexes

I'd guess it's just a matter of practice since your skills and gear are just fine. You'll get faster with moving the probes and "reading" the sig indicators.

I use 2-4 scans to get most signatures, taking a few minutes if I'm not in a hurry, same skills and gear as you. On my prober alt I resolve more sigs with just two passes (8AU>2/1AU, depending on sig strength), but occasionally still need 3 or 4 (8AU>2AU>1/0.5AU) if I blunder with probe placement or the sig is really weak.

I do mostly probing in hisec, so I'm not sure if things are different in low/null, but I've found that using the simple "cross" method with 4 probes is almost always the best way to get a sig down to 80-90%.

My Astrometric acquisition, pinpointing, and rangefinding are all at IV; Science is at V. I fly a Heron rigged with 2 Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrades. With these skills and that ship, I can scan down a Radar site in about ten minutes (I get lucky sometimes and get one in five minutes). Mag and Grav sites I can get in about five minutes.

Some sigs, like Radar, are hard to pin down. I almost always have to use 6 instead of 4 probes for those once I've scanned them to 97.5%.

EDIT: I'm using Sisters scanners and probe launcher, btw.

That's about as tight as I weave my probes...though it is hard to tell exactly without the Box + Arrows on each probe. (As a reference, I try to loop the edge of an outer probe so that it encases the opposite arrow of my central probe. )

I also use the star. (1 central probe with 2 probes at opposite ends of each X/Y/Z axis)

Also: How did you get rid of all those little boxes with other stuff in the system? (Like nearby stations/gates and such) I find they frequently interfere with me trying to re-position my probes while scanning.

As much as I hate the celestials interfering with probing, I can't magick them away- the screenshot was taken in a wormhole system, which don't have gates or stations.

I probe and run sites in my tengu, so my scan strength isnt as good as it could be if say i was in a buzzard with grav rigs ect.

My skills are 5/5/5 and i always use just 4 probes, sisters probes ina sisters launcher too.

Look at it like a clock face, a probe at 12/3/6/9, overlap them approx 30% so it gives you a kind of cross over pocket in the center by all 4 probes.

Doing it like this i always 2 step my first scan from 32-8 and again from 8, once ive scanned again, down to 2 and 9 times out of ten i still have the sig locked down (now and again i;; lose it and get the red sphere/ring) at 2AU. From there say its a 4/10 sig, i can pin it 100% the next step (1AU)

Takes me 30-45 seconds to get 100 from start to finish, but i do explore full time and im pretty good with using 'shift' and 'alt' to move all my probes at once and to pull them in when stepping down too.

TL:DR

Just practice practice practice.

You'll have to excuse Salazar. He's better than all of us, so sometimes it's painful for him to stoop to our level. He means well.

Looks like you can use 7 probes.

Simply keep one in the center. That probe has 6 arrow tips, arrange the other 6 probes so they touch that center probe's tips, arrow tip to arrow tip.

ALT+click reduce/expand range while keeping the pattern, and SHIFT-click to move around in unison.

Yup, press shift to move or resize the probes all together. I only recently found this out.

Yeah shift+click, typo.

Yes, he obviously thinks that just because you only 4 probes for quadrilateration that the extra probe is superfluous and adds nothing.

It does however improve the original sig hit if used at one scan size down.

Try it and see is all I can say.