Maybe I don't understand, but doesn't a transporter located on someone's chest (and thus, part of what gets beamed) need to transport ITSELF (and thus break itself down into a matter stream and then reconstruct itself) when it beams someone from one place to another? If so, how does the process of beaming remain stable enough for the transport to happen at all? And if so, how does it do that?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Folded-space_transporter Maybe they perfected the Folded-Space transporter without getting Biological Beings sick. If they figure it out, it could be a more efficient / faster / safer way of Transporting.
A transporter doesn't have to worry about reconstituting. Even the good old 24th century version worked all right in situations where the victim was first turned into phased matter, the transporter then went kaboom along with the ship it was in, and then the victim returned into our realm, none the worse for the wear. In basically every turn, we're told stuff that gets phased doesn't stay phased. It is sometimes said to "degrade", but basically it apparently just wants to turn back into normal matter. So a transporter is just a phasing machine that then gives the phased ghost a push so that it glides through walls and space to a target, just in time for the bobbing-back-to-realspace act. How this works when the sending end is the one lacking the machine... Is a trick mastered in the early days already. And the same trick might very well be used for transporter systems where the machine is at neither end, but itself travels in the middle. Timo Saloniemi
Its probably advanced to the point where a sufficiently strong signal is sent out a milisecond or microsecond before transport via subspace which is then maintained to reconstitute energy into matter at a designated transport site. While in the 23rd and 24th centuries you needed transporter pads to lock on to an object, preserve the matter which was converted into energy and then send it to a location of your choosing that's within range, in the 32nd century, all of this is probably accomplished via the personal transporter that would likely be microscopic (or less) in size well by that point... and the only thing you need to worry about is maintaining signal cohesion... and I surmise that once you send out a signal, your energy (along with the personal transporter) are sent along this signal (via subspace) to the desired location. Think of it like a starship using Warp or even a spore drive. The drive and the ship transport themselves to the desired location. The ship uses subspace to get there. I would imagine that not very long after the 24th century, the technique for personal transporters was perfected. We've seen in TNG that subspace transporters (while initially having a problem of leaving people with cumulative body damage), work along the same principles. You need a simpler emitter that's the size of a wristband... and voila... so, this is probably the same technology (just perfected to eliminate any cumulative health issues) and of course minituarized to the point of being the size of a nanite or an atom (by the 32nd century, it would likely be the size of an atom... or subatomic).
Also there's no evidence they don't connect to some other source, like Booker's ship or the station that the Andorians/Orions control.
I always figured such self-transporting systems (32nd century or earlier) would consist of two independent, but communicating systems, each a fully capable transporter itself. First transporter system A transports system B and the person to the new location. Then transporter B transports system A over to the new location in turn. All phases done within nanoseconds of completion of the previous phase.
Was going to say this. A double piggy back transporter is the easy way to do this once you have miniaturized the transporter and the power source. Though I also agree with Timo that transported material wants to reassemble by itself under normal circumstances.
The ability to track a transport in a jiffy is also all-new here. Perhaps it's an artifact of this piggy-back system, which makes it doubly easy to follow the trail? Or then future sensors just are faster, being able to follow a rapidly dissipating trail where 24th century ones still could not. This is IMHO much better than assuming they have the improved range to spot the reemergence, because they then wouldn't need to - they could just scan for our two B-stars at that distance, wherever they were... Timo Saloniemi
Or the locals have access to their local Planetary Satellite Sensor data and no matter where they teleport PlanetSide, the AI from the Computers can filter through all the sensor data and track down where Book teleported to, and the pursuers can eventually catch up, even if they loose their trail temporarily.
...But that makes one wonder why the satellites can't simply spot Booker himself, regardless of what he's currently doing. OTOH, if the sats are only good for observing the flashes of transportation, how can they tell which ones are Booker's? We see other transporting going on at the Mercantile. It sorta seems as if breaking the chain of evidence at a single point by going underwater means Booker can then keep on transporting at will, so it's not as if the pursuers have his personal transporter signature or anything. Timo Saloniemi
Maybe they already have and that's why they the pursuers were so good at chasing them despite teleportion. He's the only one running / teleporting away from the facility with extra person in tow? We didn't see anybody else teleporting away in the same vicinity as Booker.
But does this mean the two walk from the spot where they get wet to the spot where they try to board Booker's ship but get caught? If they can spot Booker's signature, then the escape is for naught anyway. He can never use his transporter again, not on that planet - but the authorities also can browse their records for his past activities and spot his ship that way. Why would he be unaware of that? But the issue of "vicinity" gets confused with the first beaming already. If the sats just spot transporting, but don't track it from A to B through all the points in between, they won't be of much help. And if they can follow the trail from their high perch, it should be trivial for them to see that one of 'em points towards a body of water and then disappears! Timo Saloniemi
Transporters don't actually break matter down in normal operation. They put matter into a state of subspace energy projected through normal space, which is why people can do stuff in mid-beaming. Besides, all of the earlier mini-transporters self beam. You can't have evidence of a negative, also the beaming is stated as a personal or mini-transporter indicating it is self contained, which is in line with previous miniature transporters. It's also in line with Book having interstellar comm on him the whole time. It's a wonder he and everyone else doesn't also have personal forcefields to go with the ship like personal technology. They shouldn't even need satellites to track the beaming, Trek sensors are good enough a single sensor in the city could be enough to cover the whole planet.
But obviously it is not, since it takes ages for the goons to find their way to Book's ship. Either sensor tech in 3188 is appropriately post-apocalyptically inferior, or then the planet has the usual dampening field from the standard exotic mineral or whatever. (I rather suspect there are no working satellites in the debris-filled orbit, no nearby starships are volunteering data for the black hats, and Booker is simply covered by the horizon.) Seems somebody changed their minds there: as shot, the footage clearly shows Booker and Burnham arriving at the ship via transporter (they are facing away from the ship, and stumble into the scene with pronounced forward tilt, with Book fiddling with his wrist control), but as aired, the scene omits the transporting VFX and then inserts a preceding long distance shot where the two are slowly walking on the beach (again away from the ship!) as if to suggest they actually walked there all the way from the bathing location. This change of heart allows us to think that the very act of beaming in cues the enemy sensors. Why else would Booker avoid beaming, now that the trail of evidence has been cut? This then again raises the question of how the bad guys can tell a particular beam-in is Booker's. If the system can track specific signatures, and Booker's personal transporter is hardwired to carry his personal signature, he's pretty much screwed. But if the system just notifies the users of all beam-ins, and the baddies then decide which is likely to be Booker trying to access his hidden ship in the deep outback... Well, writers of future episodes can breathe a bit more easily. Timo Saloniemi
Are we really sure the personal transporters are not just control devices for a planet wde set of scanners/emitters? 30 seconds could be a recharge time to be powerful enough to reach the nearest scanners with enough power to send the destination and numbers of transportees?
I'm quite ready to think that the ST:NEM button was just a remote that compensated for the loss of some central scanning resource Shinzon knocked down, a fairly minor step up from the remote seen in "Non Sequitur". Or "Concerning Flight", for that matter. But if the 3188 devices are mere remotes, then this tracking business should be fairly trivial; it seems likely that the Orion-Andorian bunch controls most resources quite directly. Considering the effort they put into capturing Booker, they might even shut down the whole system in order to strand him. Timo Saloniemi