Thanks Claret, you can force the VOR to be used by using a dummy route to start with that has the VOR closer than the NDB, it will then use the VOR. Once the VOR is in the route you can change the rest of the route to what it should be. This is pretty useless though, I'm surprised you can't just type "
TBD" and get a popup window asking to select either the NDB or VOR. I suspect that the American designers forgot that NDBs are still in use in other parts of the world.
Interestingly enough, even when I do get
TBD VOR in the route, it still won't accept the airway Y12 that starts at the
TBD VOR. It seems there are two problems. You can also have routing problems from an RNAV waypoint.