Christopher,You asked about transitioning the airway. Here's an example out of Denver. This is an old DP (Rockies3), but the principle is the same.On the DP, you see all the Westbound routes out of KDEN, with the transition points to the airways, or routes to the airways on VORs.Notice the Dove Creek transition has a fairly convoluted path, with a fix as a turn point, and not a navaid or intersection. It happens.The lower map is from FSNav with the current AIRAC cycle, with the transition from Denver to CONNR to Red Table (DBL VOR) where you pick up whichever airway you'll fly. We'll fly J-60.The call would go something like "GuardRail 3282, Rockies 3 departure, Red Table transition, climb to 12,000, winds 210 at 15, runway 17R, cleared for take-off."You'd take off and as soon as the gear is up fly 250 to CONNR to join the J-60 airway at Red Table.In the plan for RC, your first waypoint is CONNR, the second is DBL, then along the route.If you were going to fly a route with the Dove Creek transition, you would put that GPS fix into the plan.However, you don't need to fly a DP to do this. When you have the planned route set, find a good transition point from the airport and make that your first waypoint, even if it's 100 miles away. Then you don't have waypoints so close to the airport as to not make them.http://avsim.com/flightdeck/temp/Rockies3.jpghttp://avsim.com/flightdeck/temp/rockies3dp.jpg

I noticed that some of the "x" fixes on my low IFR chart reprints did have intersection names in the database for NAV3.1. I assume these are GPS fixes.Before this, however, I used DME from either end of the legs from the fix to approximate it, so I am assuming that is way of navigating without GPS as well as radial interception from the respective VORs.

Scott:Great information!Thank you for the explanation and the images :)Christopher