Forgive me for my overly simplistic description, I’m not a pilot, but here’s what I do.
The heading dial on the ADF gauge needs to be rotated manually to your reflect your current course heading (it’s for indicative purposes only). When you set that you can see where the 178deg radial to the NDB beacon acually is so you can set a course & travel until you intercept it.
Now on the way you may need to change course heading to intercept it, so if you do you will have to change the ADF heading to that same course too to reflect that.
So in your example say I want to intercept the 178deg radial to that NDB I may have to manually set a aircraft course heading of 223deg (in example you list) and also set the ADF heading dial manually to be 223deg (the same). I then travel on that heading until the arrow on the ADF gauge points to 178deg, I can then change the course heading of the aircraft to 178deg to intercept that radial.
NDB’s force you do intercept this radial with manual adjustments to heading. VOR’s can be intercepted automatically. VOR/DME give distance/range info too.