Electrically short antennas behave as capacitances and electrically long ones behave inductively, to get the best results you can include a capacitor of inductor (often vairiable and will depend on whether it's electrically long or short) to tune it to resonance.
1/2 wavelengh dipole is the best simple type to use even though a 1/4 wave monopole is the most used and will do for most applications.
Normal 1/2 or 1/4 aerials don't have any gain as they're omnidirectional, to get more gain a yagi array or log periodic antenna is used.