You stated you're using the tiny 5" "barely an excuse for an antenna" antennas that come with the RTL sticks, and that's most likely the cause of what you're experiencing. If you hear anything at all then yes, the stick or sticks are working, you just need a better antenna. Overall those 5" things aren't going to work well at VHF frequencies like NOAA weather - you may find something "louder" if you move up in frequency to UHF or in the 800/900 MHz range (which is most likely).
Here's what I'd suggest and what I did myself, it's a "ghetto mod" but it held me over till my MCX to BNC pigtail arrived and I was finally able to attach a real antenna - mind you this will render one of those crappy things useless, or both, but it's reversible:
- take one of the 5" antennas and disconnect it from the RTL stick or whatever
- use your fingernail or a razor blade to very carefully raise a portion of the black "cover" on the bottom of that antenna base, it's just held on by a sticky glue and can be removed rather easily
- when you're removing it you may notice one of two things based on the fact that there's a tiny magnet in there, a button-sized one, and it'll either be 1) stuck to the black plastic cover you're pulling off, or 2) more like it'll be stuck to the inside of the circular metal insert that sits flush with the inside of the base itself
- once the black plastic cover is removed (regardless of where the magnet happens to be) you'll need to use either the corner point of a razor blade or perhaps a tiny flat blade jeweler's screwdriver - wedge that into the space between the base plastic and the circular metal insert and gently pry that metal insert completely out
- when it's out you'll see the brass metal insert (that the antenna screws into) and it'll just have a tiny dab of solder holding the center conductor in place, the ground of the coax isn't even attached to anything at all, not even that circular metal insert (not much but it
could function as a ground plane to a very small degree
- either cut the wire totally at the solder point or desolder it and remove the coax from the antenna completely
Now you've got a piece of coax - as cheap as that particular very thin high loss not shielded at all coax that you can then attach to another piece of wire to make yourself an antenna proper. I did that myself when I got my first RTL stick in December, as a stopgap measure till the pigtail arrived, and basically made a very crappy homebrew wire OCFD (plenty of details about it here at the forum, just search for it, and there's an RR wiki entry about it too) - didn't even solder things, just cut the end of the coax clean, stripped back about 1/2" of it, attached a 48" piece of 18 gauge copper wire to the center conductor, then an 18" piece to the "ground" conductor.
I taped - yes, taped, with a few pieces of good old masking tape - the whole thing to a wall in my apartment and plugged it into the stick which is/was connected to a 12 foot USB extension cable (with the shielding removed, but that's another thread). You need to make sure the coax then comes off at a 90 degree angle (makes a "T" basically) since it works like part of the antenna itself. No, I didn't bother using the matching transformer and it still works, albeit not as well as a properly built OCFD according to design.
You can do this in 5 minutes or less, seriously, and it'll dramatically improve things in terms of reception over that crappy 5" nearly useless thing that came with the sticks. It's better than not being able to hear or receive most anything till the pigtail or whatever you ordered arrives.
And it's reversible: all you'd have to do is put the cable back into the base and resolder that one center conductor, but I highly doubt you'd want to do that once you realize - by using a better antenna, even a coat hanger attached to that coax - can and will be.
As far as connectors, no, Radio Shack doesn't carry anything MCX related. Lots of BNC, N, SMA, etc, but not MCX. Fry's does, however, but you don't have a Fry's in Maine. You need something like this or something similar (depending on what type of connector you want on the end for the antenna(s), of course:
http://www.amazon.com/coaxial-coax-cable-assembly-female/dp/B00CSCTB4Y/
Order two and you're good to go.
Hope this helps...