Just an educated guess, your inability to receive the repeaters unless connected to an external antenna was likely due to
a high noise floor in the vicinity of the radio while operating on the rubber duck. The VHF band in general suffers from much
higher noise environments than it did twenty or more years ago because of all of the electronic pollution that exists today.
What he said. I live in a metro area and, like most people, have a lot of electronics in my house. VHF reception is horrendous, even on a high quality receiver such as an Astro25 or APX radio. It may be my imagination, but the ham 2m band specifically seems to be worse than other parts of VHF. There is a 2m repeater near me that has multiple receive sites, at least one of which is a lot closer to my location than the repeater transmitter. I can easily get into the repeater with a 5W handheld, but my reception of the repeater can be nonexistent depending on where I set my radio and how much garbage happens to be in the "air" that day. It's maybe a bit odd for this to happen with three separate repeaters, but not outside the realm of possibility.
I recall 20 or so years ago, when things were just starting to get bad, my father, also a ham, would go around the house trying to track down electronic devices spewing noise on 2m, and either install ferrite chokes on the power cables, turn them off when not in use, or get rid of the offending device. Nowadays, it's a lost cause.
