An Introductory Note About DIY Antennas

Even if the antenna says 1090 MHz, most of the time it’s not optimized for that frequency.
Almost all such antennas are falsely called 1090 MHz antennas.

For whip antennas, i haven’t encountered a case where the performance didn’t improve when cutting them to length:
How to improve performance of whip antenna of DVB-T

If you are using one of the nooelec antennas, those are very very bad. (unlikely with your range)

Thoughts on optimizing gain