SIG Sauer Kilo Warp 6K Review: Weapon-Mounted Rangefinder Tested

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

SIG Kilo Warp 6K: Two Years on Backorder

The SIG Sauer Kilo Warp 6K is a weapon-mounted laser rangefinder with a full Applied Ballistics Elite solver, an onboard weather station and a big daylight-readable screen that sits on top of your rifle where you can read it without coming off the gun. I sat on the backorder list for two years waiting for this unit. It finally showed up.

We reported on the Warp several times before it shipped, and it kept slipping. Part of the delay, as I understand it, was a housing that wasn’t right on one version. SIG has been developing this rangefinder for more than five years and went through several design iterations before calling it ready. Having spent time with the production unit, I think the wait paid off.

SIG Kilo Warp 6K Video Review

Kilo Warp 905 vs. 1550 With SIG’s Engineer

SIG Kilo Warp 6K Specs

Spec	SIG Kilo Warp 6K (905 nm)
SKU	SOKW39C0
Laser	905 nm, Class 3R
Ranging engine	LightWave DSP Gen II with HyperScan
Max range, reflective	6,000 yd
Max range, trees	2,000 yd
Max range, deer	1,700 yd
Beam divergence	1.9 x 0.3 MRAD
Range response time	0.25 sec
Scan refresh	4 times per second
Range resolution under 100 yd	0.1 yd
Ballistic solver	Applied Ballistics Elite, full AB bullet library and custom drag curves
Onboard sensors	Temperature, pressure, humidity, digital compass, inclinometer, cant
Profiles stored	Up to 25 (two can display at once)
Display	1.8″ reflective TFT, daylight readable
Zeroing laser	Visible green, collimated with the ranging laser
Remote	Bluetooth, M-LOK and Picatinny mounts included
Mount	1913 Picatinny
Battery	One CR123A, 4,000 ranges minimum
Dimensions	1.7″ H x 4.7″ L x 3.4″ W
Weight	14 oz with battery
Weatherproofing	Waterproof and fogproof
Recoil testing	5,000 rounds of .308, 0.3 MRAD max zero shift over 500 rounds
Warranty	SIG Infinite Guarantee
MSRP	$1,999.99

Kilo Warp 905 vs. SWIR 1550: Which Laser Do You Need?

SIG makes the Warp in two versions, and the only real difference between them is the laser.

The 905 nm version is the one in this review, and it’s the one most of us will buy. 905 nm is the standard wavelength for consumer rangefinders. It’s in the near-infrared, which means it’s visible through image-intensified night vision. I put the Warp under night vision the first night I had it to try to figure out how large the beam divergence is and based on what I can see it’s pretty tight.

The 1550 nm version is the military and law enforcement model and is referred to as the SWIR. That wavelength is out of band, so night vision won’t pick it up. It is also far less affected by solar washout, which degrades every 905 nm rangefinder to some degree in bright sun. SIG puts the 1550’s non-reflective range at roughly 4,000 yards, about double the 905. Its beam divergence is 1 MRAD, and it has a provision for a wired remote in addition to Bluetooth.

The catch is cost. 1550 nm lasers are much more expensive to build, and the 1550 SWIR is in the $10,000 range. SIG will sell it to civilians, but for most users, it isn’t worth five times the price. The software and menus are the same on both. Only the laser performance changes.

Beam Divergence: 1.9 x 0.3 MRAD

Beam divergence is the first question every long-range shooter asks about a rangefinder, so I asked SIG directly. The 905 nm Warp’s beam is 1.9 MRAD tall by 0.3 MRAD wide. Before I had that number, I estimated it under night vision at less than 2 mils tall and under half a mil wide, so the spec matches what I saw.

That is a tight beam, but it isn’t as tight as SIG’s own Kilo 10K line, which has the smallest divergence in the industry. When I asked why a newer product has a wider beam, SIG’s answer came down to physics and packaging. Laser safety caps how much energy can come out the front, and that limit depends on the size of the objective. Within that limit, divergence depends on the laser’s power, its stripe size and the focal length of the optics. You can shrink the beam by making the unit bigger, but a weapon-mounted rangefinder that is too big becomes useless on a rifle. SIG balanced range, divergence and size, much the way a suppressor designer balances sound, weight and length.

I also put a competing 2K weapon-mounted rangefinder under night vision the same night. Its beam looked substantially larger than the Warp’s and noticeably dimmer. I don’t know yet exactly how that translates to ranging performance, and I have had no problems with that unit. A head-to-head test is coming.

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Ranging Performance

The 6K in the name is the reflective maximum: up to 6,000 yards in perfect conditions. I haven’t gotten a reading anywhere near 6,000 yet, and I don’t expect most people will need one. The numbers that matter more are the non-reflective ratings, 2,000 yards on trees and 1,700 yards on deer.

In my testing, the Warp beat the deer rating. I was getting readings off black cattle beyond 1,700 yards. Black, long-haired cows absorb the laser and are a poor ranging target, and it didn’t read them every time, but it did read them. On steel and even on dirt out to around 1,450 yards, ranges came back instantly.

One target in my field test sat right on the skyline at 478 yards, the kind of target a lot of rangefinders struggle with. The first press ranged past it. Holding a hair lower on the target gave me the correct reading.

Under the hood is SIG’s LightWave DSP Gen II engine. SIG rates range response at 0.25 seconds, and HyperScan refreshes four times per second in scan mode, even past a mile. Under 100 yards, it resolves to a tenth of a yard.

Housing and Controls

The housing is shaped like a bar of soap. Every edge is rounded, and every control is inset. I’ve been carrying the rifle in and out of a backpack scabbard, and the Warp slides in and out without hooking on anything.

The power knob is low profile and has three positions: off, ranging, and range card or target card mode. You can’t bump it on or off by accident. The laser cover is a half cover with a tab. Grab the tab, flip it up and you’re ready, with nothing to hook it on.

The windage and elevation adjustments for the laser are deeply recessed. The five-way joystick on top is recessed too, so it won’t break off or get pushed over, but your finger still gets in there easily.

The range button is big, square and dished, with medium pressure. You know you’re on it without looking. It sits on top toward the rear, on the left side, where a right-handed shooter can reach it from a firing grip.

On the back, a small glass window is the ambient light sensor that drives auto brightness. (Here’s a tip: In sunlight or decent lighting you don’t need any back lighting and I now run it on Moonlight rather than Auto to save the battery). Just below it is a port for the onboard weather station. On the opposite side of the on/off switch is the battery door. It takes one CR123A, which is easier to find than the CR2 in many rangefinders. The door is knurled, tethered so you can’t lose it in the dark or in tall grass, and slotted so a coin or knife blade will open it if you overtighten it. A sticker inside shows battery polarity. SIG rates it for at least 4,000 ranges per battery.

There’s a torque spec printed on the bottom of the unit for mounting to a pic rail or diving board.

The 1.8-Inch Daylight Display

The display is my favorite part of this rangefinder. It’s a 1.8-inch reflective TFT that I can read easily in full sun. It starts up fast, and the startup logo can be turned off in the menu so it’s even faster.

On the main screen:

• Top line: range, elevation hold and wind hold, with arrows showing direction (or plus and minus, if you prefer)
• Middle: direction of fire as a bearing, such as 218° SW, plus the wind speed and clock direction you have entered
• Bottom: retained velocity and energy at the target, plus your second profile’s solution if you have one turned on

At 820 yards, it showed my 6.5 Creedmoor still moving at almost 1,700 feet per second.

You can show holds in MRAD or MOA, choose precise numbers to two decimals or rounded numbers, run the screen in landscape or portrait if you mount it sideways, pick a theme, customize some of the fields and set brightness to auto or manual.

Applied Ballistics Elite and Full Atmospherics

The Warp runs Applied Ballistics Elite, the premium solver, with the full AB bullet library and custom drag curves. You build profiles in SIG’s BDX 2.0 app or in Applied Ballistics Quantum, and the Warp stores up to 25 of them. You can also set range mode to give you a bare range with no ballistics at all.

What separates it from other weapon-mounted rangefinders is the sensor suite. It has onboard temperature, barometric pressure and humidity, so it’s basically a Kestrel without the wind meter, plus a digital compass, inclinometer and cant sensor. Climb a mountain and it picks up the pressure change and corrects your solution. On my range day, the sensor screen read 62.2°F, 27.2 inHg and 34% humidity, along with azimuth, incline, cant, latitude and declination.

The compass calibrates itself. Older SIG products, and plenty of current ones from other companies, make you spin the unit in circles and flip it over. On the Warp, simply handling it is enough. Because it knows which way you’re facing and where you are, the solver can apply Coriolis, spin drift and aerodynamic jump automatically. Each can be turned on or off.

You can also override the temperature sensor. If you’re driving around at 20 below with the heater at 70 and stick the rifle out the window, the Warp thinks it’s 70 degrees. Switch temperature to manual, enter the real number and the solution is right.

Two Profiles at Once

This is one of my favorite features. The Warp can display a primary and a secondary profile at the same time. I had my 6.5 Creedmoor with 147-grain bullets as the primary and a 338 Lapua as the secondary. At 820 yards, the primary called for 6.29 MRAD up and 1.14 wind, and right below it, the second profile showed its own elevation and wind hold.

Two shooters on two rifles can work off one range. Or run two loads in the same gun: subsonic and supersonic in a 300 Blackout, tracers and ball, whatever you need. Both solutions come off one press, with full AB Elite wind for each. You can turn the secondary off in the profile menu.

Wind Input

Push the joystick and you can change wind speed and clock direction without re-ranging. The solution updates instantly. Speed increments can be set to one, two or three miles per hour for faster input. You can use a clock face, which is how I think about wind, or simple left and right. There is also secondary wind that can be turned on, such as 10 mph, alongside the one you adjust.

Live Range Cards and Target Cards

Turn the power knob to its third position and the Warp becomes a dope card that is always correct for current conditions.

The range card gives you holds at set intervals without ranging anything. You choose the minimum distance and the increments. I set mine to start at 100 yards in 25-yard steps. Want a 575-yard shot? It’s 3.6 MRAD, read straight off the card. A target I’d been shooting at a little over 1,000 yards matched the card’s call. Because the card uses live atmospherics and whatever wind you’ve entered, it updates as conditions change. It’s a printed dope card on your wrist, except it lives on the gun and doesn’t go stale.

Hold the joystick to the right and you get the target card. Scroll to a slot, range a target and the Warp stores it. I loaded five targets at 873, 691, 290, 1,276 and 528 yards in less time than it takes to explain. If you range the wrong target, range again and it asks whether to overwrite. Then hold the wind button, set the clock and speed, and every stored target updates. For a PRS or NRL Hunter stage, you can range everything before the timer starts and shoot the stage in order off the screen, the same way you’d use an armboard.

SIG says you can build custom range and target cards, such as specific stage distances. I haven’t tested building them in the app yet.

Haptics, Level and Other Features

The Warp vibrates, and you choose what for: a good range, a failed range, coming back to level or falling out of level. I turned off the failed-range buzz so it only vibrates when I get a good reading. The level vibrates every time you cant the rifle, and arrows on screen show which way to roll back. Sensitivity is adjustable to 1, 2 or 3 degrees. I run mine at 1. During the field test, I could feel the cant warning through the stock.

Motion activation shuts the unit down after a set time without movement to save the battery.

Like the Kilo 10K, the Warp can drop a waypoint on whatever you range and send it to onX, Basemap, Google Maps or Apple Maps so you can navigate to it.

It also talks to SIG’s BDX scopes over Bluetooth, so you can range, adjust and engage without coming off the glass. You don’t need a SIG scope, though. It works with any scope on any rifle.

Bluetooth Remote

The 905 Warp ships with a Bluetooth remote range button, along with M-LOK and Picatinny mounts for it. I didn’t have M-LOK or a rail where I wanted it, so I put Velcro on the metal clip and stuck it to the side of the rifle. Now I can range without breaking my firing position. The Velcro adds some thickness, so if this unit stays married to this rifle, I’ll probably glue the clip on directly. The range button on top is still easy to reach from a firing grip if you skip the remote.

How to Zero the Kilo Warp

The Warp has no sight of its own. You aim it with your rifle scope, so it has to be zeroed to the scope. On the front you’ll find three windows: the visible laser, the IR ranging laser and the receive channel.

The visible laser is a bright green dot collimated with the ranging laser. Turn it on in the menu, look through your scope and turn the windage and elevation screws until the green dot sits on your crosshair. Measure the offset between the scope and the Warp, up and down and left to right, and set the laser parallel to the scope so it stays aligned at every distance. SIG includes a target to help.

One mistake I’ve made before: your turret has to be at zero when you range, because that’s where the laser is zeroed. If you have 9 mils dialed, you’re not pointing the laser where you think you are.

Field Shooting Test: 478 to 1,028 Yards

I ran the Warp on a 6.5 Creedmoor shooting 147-grain bullets, prone off a bipod. The process for every target was the same: turret at zero, crosshair on the target, press the button, dial what the screen says and shoot.

At 1,028 yards, the Warp buzzed to tell me the rifle was canted before I broke the shot. I fixed it, dialed 9.2 and hit. I had it on precise readout, which called for 9.16. Rounded mode would have given me 9.2 without the math.

After one day, it is the easiest rangefinder to use that I’ve run. It took me about 30 seconds in the menu to figure it out.

Recoil Testing and the SIG Infinite Guarantee

Weapon-mounted electronics live or die on recoil, so I asked SIG how they tested it. SIG tests Warp units for thousands of rounds of .308, up to 5,000 rounds. The acceptance standard is no more than 0.3 MRAD of zero shift over 500 rounds. The Warp was designed by the same team that builds SIG’s red dots that survive half a million rounds on machine guns.

When I asked about putting it on a 50 BMG, the answer was that it’s covered either way. The Warp carries SIG’s Infinite Guarantee. If it breaks from recoil, a drop or anything else, SIG covers it, and the warranty isn’t limited to the original owner. Many electronics warranties run two or three years. With this one you’re covered for life. That’s a lot of confidence in a $2,000 electronic device you’re bolting to a rifle.

SIG and the Rangefinder Market

In my opinion, SIG has owned the civilian rangefinder market for years. Nobody makes a better one. The Kilo 10K is outstanding, military units have chosen SIG rangefinders over what they could otherwise get, and NRL Hunter competitors keep switching to them. The Warp takes that same ranging and ballistic computer, essentially a Kilo 10K, and puts it on your rifle with a screen you can read without picking your head up. Other weapon-mounted rangefinders have come out recently, but some lack Applied Ballistics Elite, and some lack full onboard atmospherics. The Warp has both. The menu and display beat all other units hands down.

What to Consider Before Buying

Availability is the first problem. Units have been scarce, and when I checked SIG’s website, there were only two in stock.

The beam is tight but not Kilo 10K tight. At $1,999.99, it isn’t cheap, though it’s a fraction of the 1550 version’s price. The 905 laser is visible to night vision, and it is more affected by bright sun than a 1550. The 905 remote is Bluetooth only.

You also have to zero it to your scope and keep your turret at zero when you range. That’s true of every weapon-mounted rangefinder, but it’s a step you can’t skip.

I’ve only had the Warp for a short time. I’ll keep testing it, including a head-to-head against the competing 2K unit and, when I get one, the 1550.

Verdict: Is the SIG Kilo Warp 6K Worth It?

It was worth the two-year wait. The Warp gives you a tight, bright 905 nm laser, Applied Ballistics Elite with full onboard atmospherics, two profiles on one screen, live range and target cards, haptic level and range feedback, and a 1.8-inch display you can read in full sun, all in a 14-ounce package backed by the Infinite Guarantee. Even the features I didn’t expect to care about, I ended up liking.

It isn’t perfect. The beam is wider than a Kilo 10K’s, and you have to find one in stock. But I expect to end up owning several of these.

SIG Kilo Warp 6K FAQ

How much does the SIG Kilo Warp 6K cost?

The 905 nm Kilo Warp 6K has an MSRP of $1,999.99. The 1550 nm version is in the $10,000 range.

What is the beam divergence of the Kilo Warp 6K?

The 905 nm version is 1.9 x 0.3 MRAD. The 1550 nm version is 1 MRAD.

How far can the Kilo Warp 6K range?

Up to 6,000 yards on reflective targets, 2,000 yards on trees and 1,700 yards on deer.

Is the Kilo Warp laser visible through night vision?

The 905 nm version is visible through image-intensified night vision. The 1550 nm version is not.

Does the Kilo Warp have a ballistic solver?

Yes. It runs Applied Ballistics Elite with onboard temperature, pressure, humidity, compass, incline and cant sensors, and it stores up to 25 profiles.

Can the Kilo Warp show two ballistic solutions at once?

Yes. It can display a primary and secondary profile at the same time, for two rifles or two loads.

What battery does the Kilo Warp 6K use?

One CR123A, rated for at least 4,000 ranges.

Does the Kilo Warp work with any scope?

Yes. It pairs over Bluetooth with SIG’s BDX scopes, but it works with any scope once zeroed.

What warranty does the Kilo Warp have?

SIG’s Infinite Guarantee, which isn’t limited to the original owner.

For full specs and current pricing, see the SIG Sauer Kilo Warp 6K on the SIG Sauer website.