Power consumption (battery) during (re-)init

[ftw64]

Hello,

I'm building a (test) sensor on battery power. For now, the sketch
will toggle a binary value, send that value and then goes to sleep
for 60 seconds. I'm using an Arduino Mini Pro (3.3V) and an RFM69HW.

During the 'sleep' my battery current drops to about 5 uA. Then it
wakes up for about 40(?) ms to send the new value and then goes to
sleep again. That's great! The transmissions during this time consumes
about 150 mA, but only for a few milliseconds.

However, when my gateway is unavailable, after some time my sensor
enters the RE-INIT state and tries to connect to the (non-existent)
gateway. During this time, the battery current remains about 5 mA
(about 1000x higher) between the connection attempts. Also, when
powering up the sensor for the first time, the behaviour is the same.

That means that my battery will drain 1000x faster when my gateway
is unavailable for what-ever reason.

Is there a way to change the (RE-)INIT behaviour. For example: put
the sensor in a 'real' sleep state between the (RE-)INIT attempts?