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I run two coax cables to each wall plate (you can learn more on my structured media wall plate configurations to find out why.) One will be for my Verizon FiOS TV signals and the other is for my Over-The-Air antenna.
Each cable is terminated in a coaxial patch panel. The biggest 1U Type-F Patch Panel I could fine only had 16 ports and was pretty expensive so I wound up getting a 1U 24 opening Keystone Panel and black Type-F keystone ports to fill it with.
To help label my patch panel, and to test there are no faults I'm using the Klein Coax Explorer 2 With Remotes. This is a little review of the Klein Coax Explorer 2. It's not very expensive and it is very easy to use.
It has 4 remotes that I put on the video ports on wall plates, marking down where each color is by room and wall plate, then I go down to the basement where my structured media panel is and use the Coax Explorer 2 along with a short patch cable on my coaxial patch panel. When a green light comes up with the color that represents the remote color I check my notes and I can label my patch panel.
If there's a fault in the cable it will also let me know. It can be a little tricky to diagnose a fault because the remote color isn't indicated and if you have 2 faults out of the 4 remotes you installed, that means some extra work to figure it out. It's easy enough to do, just put the remotes on the patch panel and test the wall plate ports to see which faults match.
If there's a short in a coaxial cable that is most commonly from the braided shield being cut improperly and left too long and then wrapping around the center conductor. That's a quick fix. All you need to do is cut off the bad connector and terminate a new connector in it's place. Sometimes however the short is due to something like a screw being driven through the cable but a bad termination is more likely and is usually easy to identify by shining a flashlight in the barrel of the F-Connector.
An open fault is trickier to identify because any cable you test without a remote is shown as an open fault. If by process of elimination (you tested all other cable runs) and have confirmed there's an open fault in a cable there are a couple of easy fixes if you're lucky. The most common is that somehow the center conductor of the cable got damaged and didn't go in the hole when you screwed it into the port. If that's the case it's easy to identify and fix by putting a new connector on the end. In some cases the cable might have been damaged while pulling or someone came along and somehow damaged it after it was installed. In that case a new cable will need to be pulled.
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