[Jake M]

Unless you have some old-fashioned electrical equipment that are designed to sense microscopic electrical pulses, which you might have, you'll have to use the RC and a little programming skill.

You won't be able to detect anything with a basic multimeter, and you won't be able to get much by just hooking it up to a digital-io either. The only way that would yield any output would be if the signal pulse just happened to coincide exactly with the point in the code that reads the state of the digital-io pin. Highly unlikely.

No, as Mr. Neary said, the only real way to utilize the sensor is to program it to a software interrupt, so that the RC actually halts when the sensor sends a pulse and records it. It's not really that hard, it's just that using interrupts involves hardware specific variables that you're probably not familiar with.

If you need any help in that area, ask around the programming forum. Once you set up the interrupt, all you have to do is wave something ferrous in front of the sensor and it'll trigger the interrupt.