I've always done great with upper HF VERT antennas, from 20M on up, but for 40M and below, in 2007 I tried out Shunt Feeding my 50ft tower that I had at the time. Simple set-up, a Yaesu FT-857D transceiver, MFJ-941D manual tuner, and a simple Shunt Feed to the tower using only four 100ft GND Radials. How did it work??? So-so on 100W TX on 160M, 75M, 60M, and 40M. I already had a 40M dipole, and no way did the Tower Shunt Feed beat that, but it was less noisy on RX. TX tune-up on the preceding lower bands seemed easy, but when I broke-in to several nets, several times I'd get back, "You are not strong, but we could hear you above the noise level." I actually had gotten into a 160M net in PA where folks said the same, "Not strong, but can hear you." 160M is the band where they seem kind of snobby, if you aren't at least an Arm Chair S+20/9 copy, they don't want anything to do with you. RX was a totally different story. Just about everyone was coming in at least S+20/9, and very, very low noise floor. But, medium wave was the big surprise! In the middle of the day, NYC's big 3, (660kHz, 770kHz, and 880kHz.), were all coming in at an S9, and NYC was 300 miles east of my QTH at the time. I was hearing 1kW stations from+100 miles away! So, on MW, that Shunt Fed Tower was a MW DX king. I didn't keep it for long, since I'd gotten rid of the tower, the FT-857D, and that 1,800ft ASL property, to get the hell out of Western New York. So, if I every do a Shunt Fed Tower as a VERT again, next time I'll invest into at least 20 100ft GND Radials. How do you do it? Just type in the search engine "Shunt Feeding A Tower", and several neat sites come up with various methods to do so. I still want to run a VERT insulated wire up the trunk of the tallest tree where I am now and see what that does.