Good locations for collect wake signals

[Bigmaec]

Use a fast, agile and non-threatening ship. Like a sidey with DD5 Enhanced thrusters and a A-rated wake scanner. You'll be able to get to all wakes, it is fun to fly and nobody is going to crap their pants when they see you deploy hardpoints. Also, if you run into a Weird Person you're insurance is peanuts.

That's a bleak, depressing view of mat gathering in this game.

And unfortunately it's entirely accurate.

It's not depressing and bleak if done in a fully pimped FdL outside starports. On the contrary, it's so much fun seeing all those CMDRs brown their pants if you sit out at Jacques with deployed hardpoints.... never doing anything bad
It only goes bad if you encounter someone who knows their stuff and you get owned because your wake scanner eats so much power your hardpoints have to be disabled.

Did I mention I love scanning wakes at Jacques in a FdL?

 

[cowasaki]

I know of two sites that are basically as you described, one of which is Dav's Hope and though the other escapes me, it's relatively close to Shinrarta. If I remember correctly, it's only a half dozen jumps North and East in an un-engineered python.

Dav’s Hope.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Never collect data in Open. All of these things are available in Solo or PG, and your success rates are very much better.

With the greatest of respect: no. Being in Open when collecting wake data near stations has two effects:
1) More wakes, as cmdrs are added to the NPC ships.
2) The chance you are ganked. In practice, pretty much noone ever ganks a wake-scanning ship near a station as that just has the attacker be blown apart near instantly. Besides, a wake scanning ship costs peanuts so if you get ganked once a year the added wakes is easily worth the 100k or whatever in insurance. FWIW: I have never been ganked in five years when doing this.

I get the 'careful of gankers!' vibe of some, but in this case it really is counter productive.

 

[Vasco Sapien]

Tourist beacons, plenty of tourist ships coming and going.

Or look for a famine system and find the distribution center signal. You will find some type 9's sitting there and small ships jumping in and out to collect food for distribution.

Plenty of wakes to scan.

 

[Vardaugas]

Last time I was at an agricultural megaship (cropper class) I saw quite a few ships around. Didn't stay long enough to find out if they come and go to "pick up" food. In general megaships and installations seem to be populated. Though you may get disrupted by an attack scenario eventually.

 

[Cmdr Nemo]

Last time I was gathering scans at Jameson in Shinrarta in OPEN, there were three humans started ramming me for no apparent reason. At or about 20% left of my hull, I had had enough. I was granted permission to dock and they followed me all the way to my pad ramming me all the way. No more OPEN for me!

 

[War Eagle]

Might I suggest at the Engineer's location- right after they get their work done- snif, snif.

 

[Chaparral]

I know this is weird, but I'm getting datamined wake exceptions at encoded SSs in the CG system. There are also an ocean of wakes at the end of a CZ battle session when opponents bug out.

 

[Captain Willard]

I just go to Shinrarta on the weekends. Lottsa traffic.
I also have been rammed and taunted parked in the no-fire zone scanning.
Like many others I've built a toy for solo and pg and it's kinda fun in open.
My I-eagle with g5 DD on enhanced drives. It boosts over 800.