Comment by jerf
2 days ago
Satellite phones fit the bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_phone
They're not communicator sized yet as far as I know, but they've shrunk a lot.
You can't make blanket statements about a massive franchise written by dozens if not hundreds of writers over decades, but generally the communicators are not depicted as being able to communicate much beyond orbit either, so it's not like we need to match some sort of cross-system communication.
The orbital parameters the ships go in to for their "standard orbit" are also very hazy, but given the power the ships are demonstrated as having in both tech specs and visual representations it's very believable that during important missions the ship can linger within visual range of a given spot on an unexplored planet indefinitely, not necessitating a ring of satellites be deployed or anything. This also explains the lack of "Beam me up" - "Sure, in five minutes when we come back over the horizon" conversations. So we probably only need to match line-of-sight communications.
Trek doesn’t have anything remotely resembling orbital mechanics, the ships are just assumed to "park" wherever needed (a planet may be shown to rotate under them because they’re supposed to do that, but that doesn’t really affect anything, it’s purely for show).