Plans for The Expedition continue to evolve as we muster resources and skills. Meanwhile Potshot, the brains behind the operation, has been working on plans B, C, and possibly D to suit any changes in circumstances.
So while we have been stockpiling supplies and working on getting high enough standing to make jump clones (all the better to save wear and tear on the implant budget should podding happen), we have also been beefing up our skills.
One thing I added to my repertoire was the ability to fly a covert ops ship and use a covert ops cloaking device.
Fortunately I did not have to wait almost 50 days to get covert ops ready. It turned out that way back in October of 2006 I thought covert ops sounded like an interesting career choice. I gave up on it within a month, but I managed to train enough prerequisites that when I went to EVEMon to check out how long it would take me to go full bore with a Buzzard, it turned out to be just under 10 days.
In fact, to fly just to Buzzard just two hours of training distant, so I was able to hop into the Caldari covert ops ship almost right away to do my probing.
Buzzard in flight
And in little over a week I added the skills to make it a serious exploration ship, with the key item being the Covert Ops Cloaking device. It is nice to be able to warp when cloaked.
The Buzzard is currently fitted as follows:
High
Mid
Low
Rig
Now I just have to get a little more adept at the actual pobing mechanism and find something on which I can actually try out the Analyzer and Codebreaker. And, of course, work on just a few more skills. Always more skills.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Ok, you may wish to re-consider the code-breaker/analyzer. One of the techniques that has evolved is to simply tank (or partially kill – then tank) the first spawn of radar/mag sites and crack cans using the tanking ship(s). Unlike high sec cans, these can be cracked even whith the spawns present.
Even though the portable bounty is worth it, the contents of the cans are MORE worth it. Making it more economically worth while to simply get the contents and move on to the next site.
In this case however the cov-ops will not be the ship cracking the cans since the sleepers have this nasty habit of switching targets (poof goes the cov-ops) A cov-ops time is usually better spent keeping an eye on the d-scanner and/or hunting down the next sites etc… And remember ALL ships that have pilots that can scan should have at least a core probe launcher (only lack of the necessary astrometrics skills can possibly excuse this). You never know when your fleet can get separated and necessitate scanning out a new exit. Haulers included (dual high haulers are worth considerably more now as they provide for cloak and probe launcher in case of separation from the rest of the fleet).
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Consider seeing if you can get an Expanded Probe Launcher on there so you can use Combat probes in w-space to watch out for hostile pilots looking to get the jump on you.
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Expanded probe launcher. Those appear to be cheap and plentiful. Now I just have to figure out how combat probes work.
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The same way exploration probes work, except that they have a lower strength so you more or less can’t probe out true exploration with them (though the pure combat sites are able to be found).
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