EVE New Citizens Q&A

Probing itself is a bit difficult in the beginning and very annoying till you get some experience and have trained up Astrometric Pinpointing to lvl 3 or so, There's a bunch of tricks, little stuff you need to know about etc etc which just come from reading guides on probing and simply practising it a lot, you have to be very methodical about it. Once you got it down it's simple and will require much less attention to make it work, meaning you can then devote that attention to other stuff while you're probing "on auto pilot", knowing how to probe (note that there's a BIG difference between kinda sorta have heard on how to do stuff and KNOWING it) will be really really useful for both PVE as PVP, would you want to venture into wormhole then it'll be invaluable, and in PVP you can probe out hostiles.

That site itself is fairly easy to use once you don't have to devote all your attention to probing itself anymore. Here's how to use it step by step:

- figure out your base probe strength, open your fitting window and click on the charge info on your probe launcher, sift through the info and it should give you the probe strength for your probe, with your skills and your ship bonuses applied. Enter that number into the website on top (you'll only have to change/check it again when you change skills or fit that affects probe strength)

- set it to the faction space you're in, Guristas (Caldari), Serpentis (Gallente), Sansha/Blood (Amarr, depending on the region), Angel (Minmatar). Then set it to the space type you're in which is probably going to be high sec. Once you've entered probe strength and where you are, hit apply. Bookmark THAT new page (The url will have the info you entered)


Now for the actual probing:

- add planets to your overview, if you don't see all/most planets within 32AU then warp to planet 1 first and take it from there
- create a filter in the probing window and all all signature types to it, save it and use it
- when in position launch a core probe, set it to max (32AU) range and run a scan, the scan strength you'll see on a sig from that single, 32 AU probe will sortoff coincide with the numbers you see on that site (it's officially designed to be used with Deep Space Probes which have far less variation, so with core probes use a 0.1 to 0.15 deviation)

Lets assume you have this as your settings

if you find a signature that has around 3.20 strength it's either a DED 2/10, a Serpentis Hideout or one of the drone/Grav sites according to that site and those settings. Note that those first two options (which are in the columns you're looking for; DED, unrated and Radars) can only be entered by frigates or destroyers, so if you fly a combat frig or dessy you KNOW it's a possible target for you, so you continue to probe it down to 100%. If you're just looking for radar sites or you're flying a cruiser or bigger you then KNOW that any site that starts around that 3.20 strength holds nothing for you to do and you can thus ignore it.

If you look at the site strengths you'll notice (with these settings) that the sites you're looking for start out as a 0.40, 0.80 and 1.60 and that the BEST change you have to finding something good probably are 0.80 and 1.60. Once you realise this you can then enter a system, drop a single probe and set it to 32 AU, run a scan and assess the hits you find based on their strength (again, allow for deviation a bit) so you'll go "that's rubbish, not interested in that one either, hmm those two might be possible targets". Result is that you can cherry pick the sigs before you even start probing for real, meaning you waste a lot less time on finding crap you don't want (mostly wormholes).

Once you fully probed down a site you DO want you'll get the full name for the site, which you can then find on that website, you click on it and it'll tell you what to expect and what to shoot for loot/profit.