Hi Andew,
Apologies that a few of your messages from recent times have gone unanswered. You may not have seen my 'Vanishing Act' thread...
https://www.a2oc.net/community/index.php?threads/vanishing-act.38536/
I'm just and so geting back to work, having had a relatively prolonged period of comparative inactivity.
Multifunction steering wheel (MFSW) compatibility is a total minefield. Unfortunately, you can't just choose a steering wheel that you like and expect it to work in your car. Let's start with the standard A2 MFSW, as shown below, which was the only MFSW available for the A2 from factory...
This is a 4-spoke SE steering wheel with buttons integrated into the airbag. It controls standard Audi stereos as well as RNS-E SatNav and offers full functionality including volume control, track skipping, radio tuning, CD selection (assuming you have a CD changer), etc, etc.
As Jeremy says above, if you're looking for a modern MFSW with thumb-roller controls, you must have RNS-E.
I flew to Denmark to install this kind of steering wheel in a 1.2TDI, as shown below. You can see that it has thumb-roller controls and is flat-bottom, but RNS-E SatNav is fitted in the centre console. Jeremy's photo above shows the same arrangement, though his steering wheel is not flat-bottomed. All the photos you'll find of this kind of steering wheel installed in an A2 are fitted in combination with RNS-E. As such, if you have a single-DIN dash with a Concert II CD player, you first need to upgrade the dashbard to double-DIN, then fit RNS-E SatNav and then fit the steering wheel.
If you connect such a steering wheel to a standard A2 stereo (such as a Concert II CD player), only volume control will work. All the other buttons will be nothing but decoration.
If you'd like to have full MFSW functionality when combined with a standard Audi stereo, allowing you to tune the radio, skip tracks, etc, then you'll have to use a steering wheel from the same era as the A2. Until recently, they didn't exist as anything other than the 4-spoke SE design shown at the very beginning of this post. However, I recently devised a way of creating a 3-spoke Sport MFSW, as shown in the photo below...
This was originally a tiptronic steering wheel, designed for changing gears on an automatic. Physically, it is exactly the same as the 3-spoke Sport steering wheel fitted to the A2, except it has the up/down buttons. I have created a custom control module that intercepts the gear change commands and converts them into stereo commands. As such, the right-hand buttons control volume and the left-hand buttons control track skipping, radio tuning, etc. Whilst it works with all standard Audi stereos and RNS-E, there's a lot of work in the conversion from tiptronic to multifunction.
This steering wheel is fitted in Alanb's A2. He chose to have it retrimmed in perforated leather. At present, to my knowledge at least, it is the only Sport multifunction steering wheel in existence.
Have a think about exactly what your priorities are based on what I've written above. Feel free to ask more questions.
Cheers,
Tom