Howdy Eric.....what you need is a divide-and-conquer strategy there.
BDK suggests that it probably is your antenna and to stick a piece of
wire into the antenna connector to see what you get.....good idea BUT
DON'T TRANSMIT (or auto-tune) with this! My suggestions are these:
Connect your rig into your dummy load (essential piece of equip for ANY
ham!) and see if it will now auto-tune quickly and show full power out.
Next, as BDK suggests, try plugging in a random wire (can be
anything....test leads etc) to check basic receive operation - are there
significant signals now? I also noted you mentioning that you couldn't
read them.....are they distorted? What sort of signals were you
listening to - voice - morse - data? If you've got this far and things
seem ok, try another antenna OR another transmitter to see if it will
load into your antenna. I suspect that somewhere in these first few
steps you'll see where you have to make repairs.

73 - Gord VE1AJF