  The STAR experiment at RHIC is planning to upgrade the Time Projection
Chamber which lies at the heart of the detector. We have designed an instrument
to measure the tension of the wires in the multi-wire proportional chambers
(MWPCs) which will be used in the TPC upgrade. The wire tension measurement
system causes the wires to vibrate and then it measures the fundamental
frequency of the oscillation via a laser based optical platform. The platform
can scan the entire wire plane, automatically, in a single run and obtain the
wire tension on each wire with high precision. In this paper, the details about
the measurement method and the system setup will be described. In addition, the
test results for a prototype MWPC to be used in the STAR-iTPC upgrade will be
presented.
