Greg McNamara couldn't ignore the man's call for help

Greg McNamara said he was at home on Sunday morning when he heard the call "pan-pan" come through on his radio. Pan-pan is an emergency call for help.

He said he quickly asked him what the problem was and the Melbourne man explained he'd collapsed on the floor and didn't have his mobile but his portable radio was close by at the time.

Mr McNamara called triple-0 and stayed on the phone to the dispatcher while talking on his radio to the Melbourne man until an ambulance arrived.

"The dispatcher said stay on the radio," he said.

"I was talking to the chap and he could actually hear the conversation between the two of us. He was stressed, but he was able to understand things. He'd fallen over or collapsed. He'd been there for sometime... it hadn't just happened."

Mr McNamara said he knew the Melbourne man's voice because he had heard it regularly on a Sunday.

"When covid started he started running a welfare net for amateurs locked down during covid and he was coordinating it so I picked his voice straight away," he said.

Mr McNamara, a former electrician and member of the Warrnambool and District Amatuer Radio Group, said as a ham radio operator he was licensed by the government to have certain frequencies and talk to different people around the world. "We can talk to the international space station, we can talk to everyone," he said.

He said he got into radios from a very young age. "It's a hobby for me and if something like this happens we're obliged to help," he said. "As soon as you hear pan-pan you know the other person at the other end isn't mucking around."

He said it showed there was still a need for radios when other technology failed or couldn't be accessed.

"I think when all the satellites fall out of the sky we'll still have HF communication and we'll still be able to communicate," he said.

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