VCR tuner cannot tune in my cable channels

It is working as designed. The purpose of your cable box is to take in a wire containing all of the possible channels you might watch, and then extract *one* channel, and force it to appear as channel 3. If you connect the cable directly to the VCR, then the VCR's "tuner" (ie, channel selector) has an opportunity to extract any channel it wants. But... as you point out, your VCR won't be able to "see" any of the digital channels. So... if your goal is to be able to watch any of the digital channels, the signal must pass through your cable box, which will put the selected channel on channel 3. There is no value in going from the VCR to the cable box, since the VCR's tuner will have already filtered out all but one channel. It would be helpful to make a list of what your useage goals really are, since there are so many different ways to hook these things up. Are you interested in: - watching digital channels? - recording digital channels? - watching one channel while recording another? - using higher quality video signals (composite, s-video, component, etc) rather than RF (ie, channel 3) And so on. Keep in mind that you have *three* tuners: Your cable box, your VCR, and your TV. It sounds like only your cable box can tune in the digital channels. If your cable box puts out any non-RF signal, then the best choice would be to go: Coaxial Wire -> Cable Box -> Video Connection -> VCR -> Video Connection -> TV, with the VCR and the TV both set to "video". Then you would only use the cable box as a tuner, the VCR would only see the tuned channel (via video in), and the TV would see the same channel (or whatever tape you are playing) on its video input.