Setting Up a Gank - The Scout

Had a day off from work, so was hoping to get a few good ganks in today.  Low and behold, the EVE cluster is kaput!  Ah well, what can one do except lay out just the setup portion of how I've been initiating my ganks.  This may be old news to some, it may be new.  I'm simply documenting my processes here.
 
I find it extremely helpful to have a second character in an NPC corp as my scouting alt.  Sure, I've been called out once in the Anti-Ganking channels (more on those later), but not everyone monitors those so for me it's pretty low risk.

I've set up my scouting alt to be able to fly an Astero with Covert Ops Cloaking and (soon) a Salvager II module.  Not only is it my scout, but I use this character as my loot collector after a gank.  Whenever possible, I try to recover everything that I've dropped as well as my target.

The setup is pretty simple and straight forward.  D-Scan is the primary means of locating a target for me.  I use it exclusively, and I'll have a separate post later about my own personal methods of using D-Scan.  I do not use combat probes, as I feel it takes far too long for what I want to accomplish.

So beginning with the idea of having a target in a known belt, I warp to the belt at either 50km or 70km to scope it out.

In the above image, when I first warped to the belt, I was considerably off where I wanted to be.  So what I did was bookmarked a rock that was closer to where I wanted to be (shown above by the white square), then I warped off grid and back to that bookmark at about 30km.

My target is in the red square above - a hulk.  What I do is line myself up so that the target is directly in between me and the stargate where I'll be coming from for the gank (in the above case, noted by the yellow square).

It often takes about a minute or two to slowboat to the correct position, but once I'm there, I'm set.

In the above picture, I'm simply waiting at this point.  My target is 49km away from me, so when I jump in through the stargate, I'll warp to my scout at 50km and will land right on top of him.

That's all there is to it!  In the above setup, this did not result in a successful gank unfortunately!  The hulk had a pretty good tank setup, so kudo's to him for that!  I did, however, manage to swoop in and collect my junk before getting away.

Win some, lose some - that's the game!  I congratulated him in local before heading back to wait out my timer.