EVE New Citizens Q&A

This is a very broad topic, the overview and dscan are deeply entertwinned and both complex tools.

You don't exactly set anything particular in dscan beyond range and angle, it's all depending on your overview so the first thing you'll need is a proper overview setting. You need multiple tabs with different filters to keep the results as clean and helpful as possible.

The overview settings control two things, what's listed in the overview window, and brackets (the symbols you can see in space. The one affecting dscan is the overview window, most of what you'll see in dscan will show up in the overview window.

The first step is to create useful overview settings, it means that you have to know what's important to display. The most important thing you need to have on your overview is ships (don't skip any or it could cost you a ship), charges like probes or bombs, deployables like warp disruption fields. If you're in empire space, you will want to see stations, in w-space there's no station but POSs so you need towers too. Then you also need to see pirate NPC, so you don't get attacked by them without seeing them. Note that NPC ships don't show on dscan.
It's not an exhaustive list, if you're into sov-warfare or w-space skirmish, you will need additional settings, but this is a very basic step.
You can then add other settings, one with wrecks for salvage, one with only planets and gates for travels, etc.

On the brackets settings, it's important to see ships and NPCs, planets, gates, wormholes, charges, and other needed elements depending on your needs.

Now, dscan. By default you should define range to as far as possible, fill the box with 999999999999, it will round it to the max range wich is 14AU. Then you define a 360 radius. But dscan isn't automated like the overview, so it only serves if you refresh it often because it take only 6 sec for a probe scan, so if you wait to long you will miss the warning signs. So spam that damn dscan button every couple seconds.

Many elements won't show their range on dscan until you're on grid with those. If you spot probes, you should be worried, maybe warp to safe spot an cloak up, jump to a stargate or dock, depends where and what you do.

To use dscan with proper overview settings, you need to understand that if you reduce the angle of dscan, it will be relative to your camera position, in all three dimensions. Say you set it to 180°, if you make your camera show your ship from above, it will display what's below you, or above if you place the camera under your ship and look up. If you further reduce the angle,the middle of the screen will always be the median of your scan "cone". So if you point at a planet with a narrow angle and have a ship showing on scan, it means that ship is between you and that planet, within a 14AU range. You can then play with the range to further pinpoint it's distance from you. Using your map, you can guess if he is at a moon or the planet with the distance and their position. That's just a little example, because the process of locating someone in a safe spot will require more work and possibly probes, or setting a lot of bookmarks to get closer and closer from the target until you land on grid.

It's a very vague explanation, but you might have noticed it's a complex tool to master.

To get you started, train in highsec to find towers at moons, you can find a thread started by Louis De Guerre (not certain of the spelling, sorry) that provides a very good overview setting to get you started that you can tweak to your needs.

If you have more questions, shoot, others may have better explanations or I can try to get into more details.

Yes thank you Sin Pew, now I only wish that I would be able to see probes while having 'Use Overview Settings' selected.

As for hunting, assuming you mean hunting players, that I can answer, my answer won't be the most detailed as I have not really practiced this myself but here it goes.

First, to find a person who is not at a warpable location (station/moon/belt etc.) you will need probes.

Using your directional scanner you face the direction you think your prey will be and scan using a setting of 180 degrees. If you get a hit now is when you start narrowing that angle to get a better sense of where your target is, I believe you can use the same philosophy as some do with probes and start going by haves, so next narrow to 90, scan again till you get him/her, rinse and repeat. Remember, your d-scan does not go by where your ship is pointing, but rather the direction your camera is facing.

If you have your prey narrowed down and he seems to be in the direction of a specific celestial you can warp there and check it out, if there are multiple places he could be you can narrow down the choices by adjusting the distance of your scan. If you can do it well, getting a distance measure will also help you in deciding where to send your probes.

Once you have a direction and even better a possible distance range send out your probes and start scanning.