The preferred length of an antenna is a half wavelength but those are often not practical either for space reasons or because multifrequency working would require variable length antennas.
Quarter wave antennas work well if they are mounted on a large conducting surface because that surface mirrors the quarter wavelength to provide the half wavelength total.
In practice any length can be made to work if you have a tuning unit to resonate it although short antennas are less efficient than full-length ones. As an example, the long wave transmitter at Droitwich in the UK has an antenna a fraction of a wavelength long but it still manages to cover a large chunk of the UK and France.
So an antenna a few metres long may be well below the ideal length but can still be made to work. I've had 200 mile distance contacts on amateur radio from a car with a 2m long antenna at 1.8MHz (160 metre wavelength).
The downside of short antennas is that you end up with very high voltages involved even at modest power levels and that tends to be limiting once arcing starts to occur.