Missions & Complexes

Check your filters. When you have a sufficiently strong signal to tell you what type of signature it is, it will disappear from the results if your filters are set to ignore that type.

More probes never hurts, and you could probably stand to get a couple more ranks in rangefinding as well. Even once you can scan down any signature you're interested in, higher scan strength will improve your mental health.

If you plan on spending any time at all in wormholes, I highly recommend getting your three support skills up to III or even better IV. I got by for a while with them at III, but having them at IV has made a drastic impact on how much time I waste chasing sigs.

And deep space scanner probes.
Best
probes
ever.

I can't help but wonder if the upcoming influx of new DED sites will nerf their usefulness. If they spread desirable sites to all the different sig bands, it will be less useful to filter them :\

You may already know some of this stuff, and if you do then all well and good. Gonna go ahead and post it anyways though.

Some helpful controls to know

• Hold shift while moving a probe to move all of the probes together.
• Hold shift while grabbing the edge of a probe's bubble and scale it in/out. All probe ranges scale in/out.
• Hold alt while moving a probe to move all of the probes closer together/farther apart
• Click on a probe's name (or the name of anything else) in the Solar System map to center the camera on the selected object.
• If you hold down the left mouse button to move your probes and keep holding down the left mouse button, then you can press the right mouse button to undo your last action. (Once you let go of the left mouse button you can no longer undo)

One way to get your probes centered on an object somewhat quickly is to do the following:

• Open your Tactical view (Ctrl+D, or click the icon that looks like a sundial)
• Look at the tactical readout's horizon (the side of the disk, so it's just a straight line)
• Hold shift and center your probes on the signature
• Move the camera to a top-down view so you're looking directly down on the tactical readout (it should be close to a perfect circle)
• Hold shift and center your probes on the signature.
• Hold shift and resize the scan radius of all of your probes as needed
• Hold alt and move your probes closer together as needed
• Scan and repeat until satisfied

*Note: The tactical display isn't actually necessary for anything, it's just helpful to tell you when you're looking directly at the side of the solar system map for the first time you center your probes

Also some information about what kind of feedback probes can return.

• Red sphere: Only one probe has detected this signature. The signature is somewhere around the edge of the red sphere (not inside).
• Red circle: Two probes have detected this signature. Again, the signature is somewhere around the edge of the red circle (not inside).
• Two red dots: Three probes have detected this signature. The signature is around one of these points.
• One red dot: Four+ probes have detected this signature. Center the probes around this spot and scan.
• Yellow triangle: Your probes are strong enough to determine the type of signature being scanned. This is the point when any signature-type-specific (Radar/Ladar/Gravimetric/Magnetometric etc.) filters you have set will kick in, and the signature will be discarded if you have a filter set for it. Before this point the signature will show up even if it's filtered! If you have signatures randomly disappearing when you get closer to them, check your filter settings.
• Green triangle: You have scanned down the site to 100% and can now warp to it. Remember to make a bookmark of the signature so you don't need to scan it down later

Most signatures will be within 4AU of a planet, although wormholes will be within 8AU. So if you have a red sphere/red circle/two dots then you can use this information to determine where the signature might actually be.

• If the edge of the sphere/circle passes through a single planet for instance, check there.
• If you have 4+ probes out but only get a sphere/circle and multiple planets are close to the edge of that sphere/circle, check around the planet(s) that are farther from the center of your probes yet still along the edge of the sphere/circle.
• If one of the two red dots is far away from any planets while the other is closer to a planet, check the closer one.

Hope some of that info is helpful to you, and happy scanning. :)

I can't help but see this as a major flaw. If it disappears when the signal strength is high enough to tell what it is, then how do you know it's not what you wanted? When I'm scanning I tend to assume that if a signature disappears it's because it's not in range of my probes and so I need to rescan for a larger radius. Suppose I'm looking for radar sites, and I have it set to ignore unknown, magnetometric, ladar, and gravimetric sites. I have a single probe with 4 AU radius showing 0.8 AU to the signature. I drop the probe down to 2 AU and rescan, at which point the signature disappears. There is no way to know if it was a radar site that simply was more than 2 AU away from my probe, or if it wasn't a radar site. Switching the filters to all would confirm this, but it entirely negates the point of having the signature disappear in the first place. Not only that, but if I were to resume scanning at wider ranges, there's nothing in this system that prevents the weaker signal from reappearing. The only way to get around THIS is to explicitly block the signature ID.

The ONLY way to scan for signatures is to allow all types and selectively block the signature IDs you don't want. This new disappearing feature is completely useless. It should be removed, at least so that signature types can't be filtered individually. There shouldn't be a feature to blanket filter cosmic signature types because the mechanics of the filter system don't allow this to work properly. The same applies to specific types of ships and structures (because the probe can tell if something is a ship, structure, or cosmic signature at any scan strength, but it can't tell the difference between a strategic cruiser or a heavy interdictor, a control tower or an infrastructure hub, or a radar site or ladar site).

tl;dr: Filters are broken, only filters should be by cosmic anomaly, cosmic signature, ships, and structures. Individual subtypes (i.e. radar sites vs. unknown/etc.) should not be filterable because the system cannot discern between subtypes at lower signal strengths (therefore it shows all signals), and when the system does uncover the subtype of the signal it is filtered causing it to disappear which is indistinguishable from a lost signal.

I use a 7-probe formation:

O O


O
O O


O O



Something kind of like that; a square with 8 au probes, and an interior with 3 probes that start at 4 au and work downwards (usually only down to 1 au or .5 au).

I use the 8 AUs to cover all the distance around a planet (or something that can spawn signatures) and the 3 interior probes to find a specific site.

Astro 4, support skills at 3, in a cov ops with scan rigs. Can also be done in a scan frigate with scan rigs, but the less rigging/bonuses you have the more you have to adjust the outer 4 probes (the 8 AUs).

Get the skill to use sisters deep space probes and find what you want in 1 pas with 1 probe using this sites DSP guide.

http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/dsp/wormhole.html?str=10&f=5&sec=3

Then use the tricks above to pimpoint your target Sig. Type.

Yeah, I agree with that, personally. It's not helpful because when you filter something out without ignoring it, it won't disappear from the list of sigs in the system and will just show up again when under 25% strength if you hit its location again (at which point you have to remember if it's the one that disappeared and is therefore unwanted).

Maybe there's a good way to use the new filters and I'm just not doing it right, but I find them useless at best.

You should find some help from implants.

Very, very modest cost for PPH-0 and PPF-0... 2% probe strength, 2% reduction to scan deviation

Pricier are the PPH-1 and PPF-1.... 6% each iirc... and these implants in tandem can really reduce time needed to get to 100%.

Good Hunting