The digital beamforming synthetic aperture radar (DBF-SAR) is proposed by scholars as a promising solution to overcome the constraint of the minimum antenna area of the traditional single-channel SAR to achieve high resolution and wide swath (HRWS) by scan-on-receive (SCORE) in the elevation multiple channel. However, the inevitable channel imbalance between the elevation channels of DBF-SAR will degrade the DBF-SAR image quality. In this paper, we present a method to estimate the sampling time delay error, amplitude error and phase error based on the external calibration data. For the sampling time delay deviation, we adopt to calculate the statistical average of the position deviation of several external calibration points in the reference channel image with that of the error channel image. To avoid noise interference, we image the DBF-SAR original echo-carrying amplitude information to obtain the amplitude error between channels by dividing the absolute values of the complex image data of the error channel. Due to the phase error between channels, the image contrast will decrease. Therefore, the problem of estimating the phase error can be transformed into the problem of maximizing the image contrast. So, in this paper, we use the gradient descent method to optimally estimate the phase error. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified by the simulation of airborne measured data and simulation data.