May I suggest you consider picking up a Jeppesen Sanderson PJ-1 Plotter.
It's truly a handy tool!

In this instance, you would just lay the plotter against your pencil line,
then slide it up or down the line until one of the lat-long lines aligns
with one of the lines on the rotating degree wheel. You could then read your
course directly off the wheel.Then you could rotate the wheel to match a
magnetic deviation scale and get your course.

And my explanation is far worse than the one that came with the plotter, but
it's really a useful unit!





"Geoffrey Barnes" wrote in message
ink.net...
The presence or absence of the compass rose on a VOR has no meaning.
It is purely at the discretion of the cartographer to omit it when he
feels it
would make the chart too cluttered.

All right, this makes sense to me. But as someone who is still a student,
I
have to ask a question here. Let's say that I'm planning to fly along a
specific VOR radial, and that this radial is not part of an airway. What
I
normally do is draw a line on the chart, and then read the radial on this
compass rose. But without the compass rose, how am I supposed to
determine
the radial that I need to follow? Most of the VORs in this area have not
been adjusted to keep pace with magnetic variation, and are therefore a
few
degrees off from both both the true course and the magnetic course.

I know that I can look up each VORs magnetic variation setting on
airnav.com, but what if that wasn't available?