GPS can be used for high and lows. it’s not really restricted by altitude. My humble opinion is that you should totally drop in sim flight planning. It’s not fun at all. Half the fun of flying is actually planning your flight. The fun way to do it is actually do it yourself. The steps roughly are this.
- Spawn at your origin airport not flight planning on home screen.
- Go to either skyvector free, simbrief free, Navigraph best option not free but very reasonably priced.
and get yourself a route, with sky vector and navigraph you can build your own route or it can be generated for you. Simbrief will generate a route for you and then you can adjust it to your liking. Low slow flying is done via low enroute airways, or you can do VOR to VOR if you don’t have GPS or you can do GPS waypoint to GPS waypoint. I prefer airways whenever I can find them. - Plan your routes as if you were flying IFR. It makes it easier to follow on GPS.
Route consists of multiple parts
a) SID-Standard Instrument Departure may or may not be available may or may not be used. That’s the standardized routing to get you from departing runway out of the airport vicinity and to your first enroute waypoint
b) Enroute waypoints-Those are your airways VORS GPS waypoints
c) STAR-Standard Terminal Arrival Route that’s the standardized routing that gets you from your enroute waypoint to an airport vicinity. May or may not be available may or may not be used
d) Approach IFR approach is again a standardized routing that gets you to the runway threshold. Different types of approaches for different types of airports may or may not be available. But quite a few non grass strip airports will have a published approach procedure.
You get SIDS,STARS, Approach information from the charts skyvector has them Navigraph has them better.
My guess Approach is what is missing in your GPS when you do your flight planning.
- Once you collected all your routing information plug it into your GPS yourself manually or there are download import options too. For GA low and slow short hops it’s ton of fun to do it all manually adds to immersion.You need departure airport destination airport and approach procedure loaded into GPS at the very minimum if you want GPS to line you up with a runway.
Now another way to fly which is super fun is VFR by not utilizing GPS at all but relying instead on VFR sectional charts to get yourself from one land mark to another. You can still program waypoints into GPS as a cheat but then put yourself into heading mode and try to navigate to your landmarks. There is a great app called fltplango for ipad which connects to the sim and overlays VFR sectionals over your plane location and gives you a VFR moving map.
Another in the middle way to fly is VOR to VOR where you plan your flight based on multiple ground stations and then use your Nav radios to line yourself up with VORS on proper course radials. So you’re constantly playing with radios and courses and heading modes all throughout your flight. In that mode to keep it authentic if you want to get to your runway you need to pick an ILS approach so at the end of the route you are tuning yourself to a localizer station.
Oh yeah on the subject of ATC if it is controlled airport you can go to your ATC menu and pick an option for nearest airports when you’re close to your destination tune to that airport request full stop landing and they can give you vectoring. Or you can cheat and enable landing guidance in assists menu and it’ll show you fly thru gates. I actually use third party payware ATC package called Pilot2ATC it is quite a bit more immersive and feature rich at a very reasonable price and it has built in voice recognition so you can actually talk to ATC and the routing and ATC vectoring is quite a bit more robust. But in all fairness default MSFS ATC is quite capable comparing to other sims like XP for example in terms of giving you proper directions.