Abstract The coherent coupling between a quartz electro-mechanical resonator at room temperature and trapped ions in a 7 T Penning trap has been demonstrated for the first time. The signals arising from the coupling remain for integration times in the orders of seconds. From the measurements carried out, we demonstrate that the coupling allows detecting the reduced-cyclotron frequency (ν +) within times in the order of the decay-time constant of the energized resonator (below 10 ms), regardless of the data-acquisition time-window in use, and providing an improved resolution compared to conventional electronic detection schemes. A resolving power ν +/Δν + = 2.4 × 107 has been reached in single measurements. In this publication we present the first results, emphasizing the novel features of the quartz resonator as fast non-destructive ion-trap detector together with different ways to analyze the data and considering aspects like precision, resolution and sensitivity.