[Dracus]

I do not use sats around my planets. I like to put about 30 on each of my outer WP's with about 20 small mines. Make the sat's a combination of cannon's and missles. This gives me a buffer to unkown sectors. as i expand, I move the sat's out to the next set of WP's As soon as a ship hit's the mines or sat's, I know to move ships into that sector.

You can also plant a couple of sat's in systems that have no planets to monitor movement.