We are also having problems testing our beacons. I also had the idea to try using a camcorder on night vision mode and a night vision monocular to see the IR light emitted from the beacon, but no luck. Our team was a bit confused from the earlier discussion about how the wiring diagram may have had a bad pinout for the FET. Our IR beacons are wired like shown in the wiring diagram in this document
http://kevin.org/frc/Infrared_System_rev012704.pdf.
We tried to power these for testing with a power supply in the lab. We put ground to black (GND) and white (-) pins on the 3-pin connector, and aprox. 6 volts to the red (+) pin. Does this sound like it should work to anyone else? It looks as though we should eventually be connecting the beacons to the EDU RC pwm outputs? Is this true?