Sig Kilo battery again...alternatives?

[homebru.trout]

Found several threads with folks experiencing the same thing I'm going through...but no solutions at this point. Figured I'd run it up the flagpole again and see about alternative units from y'all as well.

As some others have noted, my Sig 4K eats batteries like nothing I've ever seen. I originally thought maybe my marsupial pouch was in contact with the button, but I've been removing it from my harness and sitting in on my desk and that doesn't change the outcome. Different battery brands from different lots...same results. I think I've put 8-10 batteries in this thing in a year. My first RF was a Vortex that I owned for years and never changed the battery in until I sold it. Next was a Leica where I changed it out annually more out of habit/good practice than anything. I bought this Sig last year at TAC and if I leave it sit for a few days it is nearly always dead. I absolutely love the speed in resolution, config options, etc but I don't use it for pairing to riflescopes and the phone config app is just a "gee whiz" thing for me. I bought it for the speed and the OIS.

Is there anyone that has successfully resolved the battery drain issue? It appears that even replacement units sent to others have suffered from this issue and I can't spend my summer with my RF in the mail. I keep battery saver on and have hard set brightness at Low-3, set auto-off to the minimum 30 seconds, etc. The one funny thing I did notice is that yesterday while I was doing some testing on a new battery, it stayed on for 10 minutes on my kitchen counter even with a 30 second auto-off.

Failing a diagnosis or permanent solution (which I can of course pursue on the side with Sig) what RFs do people love these days. I just need it to be simple, with angle compensation and always work.

Maven?
Leica? (the pause and dual reading always made me nervous but I never missed because of it)

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[Tod osier]

Found several threads with folks experiencing the same thing I'm going through...but no solutions at this point. Figured I'd run it up the flagpole again and see about alternative units from y'all as well.

As some others have noted, my Sig 4K eats batteries like nothing I've ever seen. I originally thought maybe my marsupial pouch was in contact with the button, but I've been removing it from my harness and sitting in on my desk and that doesn't change the outcome. Different battery brands from different lots...same results. I think I've put 8-10 batteries in this thing in a year. My first RF was a Vortex that I owned for years and never changed the battery in until I sold it. Next was a Leica where I changed it out annually more out of habit/good practice than anything. I bought this Sig last year at TAC and if I leave it sit for a few days it is nearly always dead. I absolutely love the speed in resolution, config options, etc but I don't use it for pairing to riflescopes and the phone config app is just a "gee whiz" thing for me. I bought it for the speed and the OIS.

Is there anyone that has successfully resolved the battery drain issue? It appears that even replacement units sent to others have suffered from this issue and I can't spend my summer with my RF in the mail. I keep battery saver on and have hard set brightness at Low-3, set auto-off to the minimum 30 seconds, etc. The one funny thing I did notice is that yesterday while I was doing some testing on a new battery, it stayed on for 10 minutes on my kitchen counter even with a 30 second auto-off.

Failing a diagnosis or permanent solution (which I can of course pursue on the side with Sig) what RFs do people love these days. I just need it to be simple, with angle compensation and always work.

Maven?
Leica? (the pause and dual reading always made me nervous but I never missed because of it)

Thanks for any feedback.

Leica CRF PRO is a good substitute. I have NOT used any of the fancy features (ballistics or adding a point on a map), but they are fast and they can be set not to dual read, so you only get the corrected angle compensated value (in my conversation with Leica when I purchased a year ago the CRF PRO was the only one that did that - the rangemaster had the dual read). Mine performs very similarly in speed to the sig kilo 2000 I had and really liked.

 

[Focus Knob]

The button may have worn out and is keeping constant contact. Get a bushnell. They're all the same.

 

[homebru.trout]

Quick follow up here on my battery issue and a shout out to Sig.

I stopped by the Sig tent at TAC in MT and got some more info/details from one of the guys there...this info was not apparent to me from reading documentation etc but I totally could have missed something.

The cause of the battery drain issue for me was that in the firmware version I was running, there's a bug that maintained an open connection between my phone and the unit...constant bluetooth scanning will eat battery in no time. I assumed that when I got a notification about a firmware update and said 'OK', that it was installing the new firmware which is not what happens. The latest firmware ships with an update to the SigBDX app on your device. Since I use my phone for work and have custom security packages installed, I leave auto-update off for pretty much everything.

Solution: Manually force an update of the Sig app via app store, install new firmware to RF unit, flash the unit and confirmed the fix over the course of the TAC weekend. The Sig rep did it for me in less than 2 minutes in the tent. The shoutout to Sig is because after I confirmed the fix after a day of shooting, the guy commented that those 123 size batteries are expensive and handed me a ziplock with a pile of new batteries in it which I thought was a nice gesture.