After seeing Oscar's post https://oscarliang.com/make-simple-whip-...near-polo/ about making a whip antenna for tiny whoops, I thought that sounds like a great idea. I'm always bending the cheap clover on mine. But on further inspection, I'm a bit confused...

From what I can tell, (by looking and beeping out with a meter) on the clover leaf, the core of the co-ax runs up and connects to the centre of the leaves. The leaves then connect to the shield of the co-ax, which is soldered to a different pad at the bottom.
However, on the whip antenna, the core of the wire, sticks out, at the top, and is not connected in any way to the shield.

Am I missing something here? Or why the difference in the two antenna?

Thanks for the help!

No, you're not missing anything. You're just looking at two different antenna design approaches.

In the whip antenna, the unshielded center conductor is the radiator, with the shielded part of the coax acting as the balance of the antenna.  The  bullet-shaped metal piece is likely often added to better match the RF impedance of the antenna and cable.  Any mismatch will lead to some losses in what the antenna is doing for you.  

The lobe antenna offers the advantage of some gain over the whip dipole, and adds a circular twist to the RF energy.  I believe the circular pattern mainly helps indoors where signal reflections can be a problem.  A receiver equipped with the same type of antenna will be more effective at receiving the primary signal than those that have been reflected off of things.

Ok thanks, so if you were to snip off the lobes and then strip back the shield to leave the correct length of the core exposed, I'd have a functioning whip?

(02-Mar-2017, 03:16 PM)bossy202 Wrote: Ok thanks, so if you were to snip off the lobes and then strip back the shield to leave the correct length of the core exposed, I'd have a functioning whip?

Yes.