Comment by eskibars

There are many different types of antennas, each with different tradeoffs. Some examples of the tradeoffs are:

- How well does it work at a specific frequency, if you're just trying to transmit/receive on one specific frequency

- How well does it work on the frequency range(s) if you're working on more than a specific frequency

- How well does it block frequencies that you don't want to send/receive

- How well directional is it to trade off using lots of radiation to blast in many directions vs a higher focus beam using less energy or getting less interference from other directions

- How much physical space do you have in each dimension?

These are just a few examples, but for example you can provide a much "better" connection in almost every sense of the word if you can make your antenna directional (point between the source and destination) only on a specific frequency, and be huge, but most of the time you have some physical space constraints, multiple frequencies to deal with, and the potential that your signal could at least come from some degrees in each the x/y/z axes, and sometimes it needs to be omnidirectional.

Again, these are just examples, but you end up with these types of design considerations that play into larger system design (can you put more transmitters up to encourage directionality, limit frequencies, etc).

There are some well known "base" antenna types like dipole, yagi-uda, circular, and log periodic dipole array if you want to look them up by name and see some of the known tradeoffs and design choices, but virtually any wire can be an antenna and there are an unlimited number of shapes, nearly all of which don't have known radiation characteristics