Hello Nick,
The Badgers are a known battery hog and in very long races will have to have the batteries changed. What we do is have one or two extra badgers with fresh batteries turned off for most of the finish. When we notice the power getting down to "one bar" on the badger display for the Badgers being used, we simply turn the backup Badgers on and hand them to the volunteer. We then swap out the old batteries in the first Badger and turn it off using that now as our backup. Thus we can keep going like this indefinitely.
As for getting all of them up and running at once, this is also not a problem as long as you make sure all of your subscriptions are setup ahead of time. Since each Badger gets one subscription to the Black Box, it is much easier to setup all your Badgers the night before the race. First clear out all of the previous subscriptions in the Black Box and then start over, subscribing each Badger one at a time. Once all of the Badgers are subscribed you do not need to do anything else and can turn everything off for the night. When you turn them on in the morning during your race preparations, all the subscriptions will still be there, and you should have no problems. I never subscribe a badger on race day if I can avoid it -- even the backup Badgers.
As one further note, it seems much easier to subscribe one Badger at a time and have all other badgers turned off while doing so. I have found that if other badgers are on and communicating wirelessly with our Black Boxes that sometimes the subscription does not take. Once every badger has a subscription, you may turn all of the Badgers on to make sure they are all working together.
Lastly, we have upgraded all of our firmware to the latest editions for version 4 but have not upgraded to version 6 either.
Stephen Carter
Director of Timing Services
TriTiming
P.O. Box 700
Mt. Marion, NY 12456