Silence surrounding old part of signal (5)
I believe the answer is:
hoist
'part of signal' is the definition.
The definition and answer can be both man-made objects as well as being singular nouns.
Maybe there's a link between them I don't understand?
'silence surrounding old' is the wordplay.
'silence' becomes 'hist' (I've seen this before).
'surrounding' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'old' becomes 'o' (common abbreviation eg in OE for Old English).
'hist' enclosing 'o' is 'HOIST'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for hoist that I've seen before include "Lift with rope and pulley" , "elevator" , "Substance forming outer skeleton of insects, etc" , "piece of lifting gear" , "set of flags" .)