Firstly you'll need a ship with at least a Core Probe Launcher I or better and some Core Scanner Probes or better. A ship with bonuses to scanning strength might also be useful such as a T1 frigate (Imicus, Magnate, Heron or Probe) but if you're scanning for combat sites those ships won't last long.
In your ship, open up the Probe Scanner window:
If you're in a system with scannable anomalies you should end up with a window that looks like this:
Next, get in the habit of flying safe. If you end up scanning in low or nul sec space you're generally an easy target in an exploration ship as you have paper thin defences and are likely too preoccupied with scanning down sites or hacking cans to notice other ships flying in.
There's a process I go through when I enter any system in my exploration ship. I always have the probe scanner window open so I know if there are any worthwhile sites to scan for a start. If there are, I pick a spot in the solar system, usually a planet or the sun and hit "warp to 100km."
As my warp drive kicks in which disables the "recently jumped through stargate" cloak I launch my probes. This is just a time saver and it helps in high sec as well as nul or low where time efficiency is your best friend (that and warp stabilizers.) In low and nul, once I've hit the scan button (most left hand of the buttons in the picture above) I close the map quickly and choose a planet, asteroid belt or stargate directly away from where I just warped to and hit "align to" and then activate my micro warp drive (or afterburner if you don't have a MWD) to put some distance between me and where I warped so anyone warping to the same spot will end up several hundred km away.
Of course you can skip that step if you have a cloaking device but still, launching your probes as soon as you arrive in the system and warping to another location means you won't get decloaked by your own probes getting too close.
Onto the actual scanning. I use the pinpoint formation almost exclusively. I find it's just the easiest to use for me although I'm sure there are other ways to do it. Your probes have already been launched by now so open up the solar system map (button on the far right of the previous picture.) With pinpoint formation up it should look something like this:
The process changes somewhat as your skills increase as you can take more shortcuts and still scan down a site. Things like Astrometrics, Astrometric Rangefinding and Scanning Rigs for when you've learned Jury Rigging help immensely.
Essentially you need to centre the cluster of probes inside the red sphere you're aiming at (this can be difficult if there's a lot on top of one another) and enlarge or occasionally decrease the radius of the scan by clicking and dragging the side of one of the blue spheres which should change the scan size of all of them. The best way to centre the probes is to level out the camera horizontally and move the cluster up or down until it's on the correct plane as the middle of the red sphere. Next move the camera directly above the probes and slide them across until perfectly centred.
*pro-tip* double click on the white box to centre the camera on the probes or, once you've gotten to the "red dot" phase, double click the anomaly to centre the camera on it. I honestly didn't figure that out for 3 days and it would have saved a lot of hassle.
Hit the "Analyze" button and something like this should appear:
Centre on the red dot, decrease the scan radius by one size by clicking and dragging the blue spheres. Scan again and the signal should increase, hopefully even high enough to show what kind of anomaly it is.
Obviously ignore any sites that aren't of the type your specifically looking for and move on to the next anomaly.
Sometimes you'll get 2 red dots for one anomaly. This means only 3 of your probes are in the right place and so it gives you 2 possible locations. Generally speaking, the one closest to the orbital bodies is going to the be the right one to scan, but sometimes the game likes to confuse you. Just use the above method on your dot of choice and scan, if there's no signal then move to the other one with the same size scan radius. Either way you'll pinpoint it eventually.
Red rings on the other hand are bad in all senses of the phrase. Getting a red ring on a scan means 2 of your probes picked up the signal and you'll have to move the probes over, usually with the same size radius, and scan again until you get a red dot.
Occasionally you'll come across a site that seems impossible to scan down. For this you'll need to move each probe manually. To do this, from the pinpoint formation zoom in a bit and hold down the shift key. This lets you manipulate each probe individually. You need to, for want of a better word, "squish" the pinpoint formation. There has to be some slight overlapping otherwise the scan just wont work but aim for something that looks like this:
You can save this formation as you'll need it more than once even at higher skill levels. In low and nul sec space there are some pretty difficult sites to scan.
Well I hope this helped any budding explorers, and don't forget to check out my other blog posts.
