Diamond nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers are of great interest for scalable applications in quantum information and metrology, such as precise measurements of electric and magnetic fields. Although remarkably long electronic spin coherence times (approaching 1 ms) have been demonstrated at room temperature, decoherence effects due to spin impurities or neighboring NV centers remain a challenge. In this invention, a sequence of radio frequency pulses is used to dynamically decouple NV centers from sources of decoherence in their environment, thereby extending room temperature coherence lifetimes to more than 2 ms and greatly increasing sensitivity for applications such as magnetometry. Furthermore, as it increasies the available spin interrogation time while preserving the signal contrast, this technique enables magnetrometry with an ensamble of NV centers.