Commissioning the PHENIX Resistive Plate Chamber forward trigger upgrade

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is the world's only polarized proton-proton collider. The spin program of polarized collisions at $\sqrt{s}=500$ GeV promises to provide new insight into the spin structure of the proton. To take full advantage of this program, the PHENIX detector is being upgraded to extend trigger capabilities in the forward rapidity region. This upgrade, which includes the installation of several new resistive plate chambers (RPCs) and electronics upgrades, will improve the efficiency of selecting W bosons by roughly a factor of 100. This talk will review the recent commissioning status and performance of RPC detectors with RHIC beam and cosmic ray data.