The reversed-field pinch features resistive-shell-type instabilities at any (vanishing and finite) plasma pressure. An attempt to stabilize the full spectrum of these modes using both (i) incomplete coverage and (ii) few coils is presented. Two empirically derived model-based control algorithms are compared with a baseline guaranteed suboptimal intelligent-shell-type (IS) feedback. Experimental stabilization could not be achieved for the coil array subset sizes considered by this first study. But the model-based controllers appear to significantly outperform the decentralized IS method.